If you want to get your website discovered as quickly as possible, manually submitting your website to search engines is how you do it. Google and other search engines may eventually find your website, so it is not necessary to inform them manually.
However, submitting your site can ensure that it is done. It is always good for your business if google knows about your website sooner rather than later. The good news is that you can submit website to search engines for free, and it is an easy task to perform.
Reasons to submit website to search engines
Submitting your website to a search engine can be beneficial, but you probably don’t have to do it. It’s because search engines are incredible at finding your site independently. Search engines like Google constantly crawl the internet and look for new sites or web pages.
So, if your site is new, search engines can discover it independently. Google also constantly scans sites it already knows for any new links. It will use those new links to crawl pages it doesn’t know about.
Google crawls those new pages as much as possible to gain all the information. When google has finished crawling a page, it will decide whether to add the new page to its index and start showing it in search results.
It sounds like a complicated process, but all this is done automatically. That’s why it is not a requirement to submit website to search engines.
However, if you do it, then you get two benefits:
- Google will crawl your site faster than your competitors. Especially if your site is new and you don’t have a lot of backlinks, this could speed up the process of getting recognized.
- Google will understand your site’s structure. This, eventually, can make you rank your website for relevant keywords.
How to submit website to search engines
You will need a sitemap to manually submit your website to search engines. Then, you need to inform the search engine where to find it.
A sitemap is what the name suggests, and it contains information about the most important pages of your website. Google scans your sitemap to understand the content structure and how it is linked.
If you use CMSs like Wix or Squarespace, sitemaps are generated automatically. WordPress also generates sitemaps automatically, but if you want a guarantee, you can use plugins like Yoast SEO.
Your sitemap is generally located on your domain’s URL like:
yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
Another common sitemap URL looks like this:
yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml
Enter either of those URLs in your browser, and a page with many URLs and codes will load. If you want a more understandable version of the sitemap, use plugins like Yoast SEO or any other plugin that your CMS may provide.
If your browser says it cannot find the sitemap at both URLs, you will have to try your website’s robots.txt file at this URL:
yoursite.com/robots.txt
When you check this page out, you should find your sitemap URL listed there.
Submitting your website to Google
When you find your sitemap URL, you should visit Google Search Console.
If you use Google Search Console for the first time, you will have to verify your property (website). Go to Google Search Console, and click on the sitemaps section. When you do, you will have the option to add a new sitemap. All you have to do is paste the verified sitemap of your website, then click on submit.
Related Post: 15 Ultimate Google Search Console Guide to Effectively Grow Your Website Traffic
Submitting your website to Bing
After Google, Bing is the second largest market share holder in the search engine market. It is a search engine launched by Microsoft to compete with Google. Even though it doesn’t give Google good competition.
After Google, if people know a search engine, it is Bing. So, you should consider submitting your website to this search engine. You will need the sitemap URL to submit your site to Bing.
Open up the Bing webmaster tools and click on the sitemaps link on the left. After that, click on the submit sitemap button. On the next page, all you have to do is paste the sitemap URL into the form.
Submitting your website to Yahoo
Yahoo’s search engines are powered by Bing, meaning that you will have to do it on Bing to submit your website to Yahoo.
Technically, you cannot submit your website to Yahoo because they will redirect you to Bing webmaster tools. Once you have submitted the sitemap on Bing webmaster tools, your website should also appear on Yahoo search results.
Submitting your website to DuckDuckGo
This search engine doesn’t have a manual submission feature, so you cannot submit the sitemap. DuckDuckGo mainly uses Bing’s index to get its search results.
So, if you have indexed your website at Bing, it should appear on Duck Duck Go. This is why submitting your site on Bing is crucial because with it you can rank on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo too.
How to check if your website is indexed?
The fastest way to check if your website is indexed by google or not is by typing this query:
site:yoursite.com
If the site appears in the search results, it is indexed by Google. You cannot be sure about each page, but your site is on google and can appear in search results with a proper content marketing strategy.
If you want to know whether Google indexed each page, use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console. Enter the specific URL of that page in the URL inspection tool and press enter. If your site page is indexed, the URL is on google text will appear with a right tick.
However, if the page is not indexed by Google, you should click on request indexing.
You can see the indexing status of all the pages on your website by opening the index coverage report. On the left section, you will find the page heading; click on that.
You can see which pages are indexed and which are not indexed. Then, you can develop an SEO plan to index the pages that have yet to be indexed.
Ideally, all the pages of your website should be indexed because you never know from which page you can get traffic. If you click on each category, you can see which specific pages are indexed or not indexed.
How to fix indexing issues?
With the help of Google Search Console, you can diagnose the problem, but you also need something to fix the problem. A good site audit can tell you how to fix indexing issues.
A site audit is a detailed analysis of your site structure. The report will highlight issues like broken links, plagiarized content, and orphaned pages.
All these problems make it harder for Google to index your website. The site audit also provides recommendations on how to solve the problem. Follow those and then submit website to search engines. The search engine will know about your website's improvements, and your website will rank better.
Are submission services legit?
Submitting your websites to search engines is already extremely easy, then why pay for search engine submission services? Some site submission service providers say they can get your website listed on little-known search engines and online directories.
The global market share of Google in the search engine market is almost 91%, meaning the majority of the world searches through Google, and you will be wasting your money by paying such service providers.
You should focus on getting your website discovered on Google. However, there is another reason not to pay site submission service providers. Google doesn’t like it when you pay another site to link back to your site.
If Google catches you in the act, your site will be penalized and no longer show up in the search results. Even if it does, you will have to work harder, and it will still rank lower than before.
So, it is best if you stick with Google's rules. Google made those rules to ensure they provide the most accurate search results. Follow the rules, work hard, work smart, and one day your website will rank at the top!
Submitting your site or site’s pages to Google is not a complex procedure, which is why it doesn’t take that long. Just follow the simple steps, and you will see that all your URLs are indexed in no time.
