How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)?

March 19, 2019 Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

By submitting your website to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you take a shortcut on your way to SEO success. It’s a simple task even for non-technical website owners, but it gives unique advantages that are not available elsewhere.

Why Do You Need to Submit Your Site to Major Search Engines?

To submit a website to search engines means to add it to the indexing queue to start growing its organic traffic. After the indexation, your site will appear in the search results in response to the users’ relevant queries.

Until a website is submitted, no search engine recognizes it. The only way to discover such a site is via a direct link received from someone you know. That’s not enough for a successful online presence. You can get many more visitors from search engines, but you need to submit your site to those systems.

One option is to wait till search robots get to your website and index it. It’s completely hassle-free, but you’ll have to wait for the traffic way too long. And if there are no external links to your website on the internet, there’s a good chance you’ll never get the desired amount of traffic.

Adding your site to search engines is a vital optimization step, so you shouldn’t let things slide. Read on to learn how to submit your site to the search engines manually.

Top Search Engines to Submit Your Site

Google dominates the worldwide market of search engines, followed by Bing and Yahoo. In some countries, people can actively use local search engines as well, for example, Yandex in Russia, or Baidu in China. Every search engine ranks websites based on their credibility and relevance to the user’s location.

How to Submit a Website to Search Engines: Links and Forms

To submit your website, you need to fill in a special submission form. Each search engine has its own one:

Does your business have an audience in China? You should also submit your website to Baidu. If not, just stick with Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

What Do You Need to Do Before Submitting Your Site to Search Engines?

You can submit your site to Google or Bing at any stage of website development, but you’ll get much more traffic if you do it in advance to meet the requirements of search engines. If the internal site optimization begins even before the first indexation, the site rankings may exceed expectations.

Here is the short list of recommendations what you need to do before submitting your website:

  1. Publish optimized content: collect keywords and add them to your pages. If your content is optimized before the submission, then you won’t have to wait for search robots to index the updated versions.
  2. Check all the site links: broken links make crawling more difficult.
  3. Add <alt> tags to all the images.
  4. Optimize your code: add URLs to the page code, write styles in separate files.
  5. Make the interface clean and intuitive for humans in the first place.
  6. Set up the robots.txt file and make sure that you’ve hidden unnecessary content from indexation (for example, print versions, sign up pages and other service directories).
  7. If you’re going to optimize your website for search at the development stage, use the guide to developing an SEO-friendly website.

Submit Your Site to Google for Indexing: A Step-by-Step Guide

Google has the fastest registration procedure:

  1. Create an account with Google:

Submit your site to Google: Step 1

  1. Add your site to the search engine:

Submit your site to Google: Step 2

  1. Confirm that you’re the site owner:

Submit your site to Google: Step 3

Here’s how a page looks like after confirming the ownership and the first indexation:

Google Search Console Overview

After that, you will need to add the Sitemap file to Search Console:

Add a new sitemap

How Submit an Individual Webpage to Google?

Use the URL Inspection Tool in the latest version of Search Console. The tool serves for inspecting URLs for errors and issues, but many marketers use it for crawling and recrawling separate web pages.

Follow Google’s guide to submitting your URL to the index:

  1. Check your URL with the URL Inspection tool.
  2. Click the button «Request indexing». Google will launch an online test to reveal any issues with your URL. You’ll have to fix them if any, and then, the URL will be added to the indexing queue.

Submit an Individual Webpage to Google

In this example, you can see that the page has not been indexed yet, so you can request indexing right here.

How to Submit Your Website to Bing and Yahoo

Submitting the Website to Bing by Bing Webmaster Tool

Before September 18, 2018, Bing offered a public tool for URL submission, but now it is no longer available.

Bing URL Submission Tool is not available

The only way to submit the new website is to use Bing Webmaster Tools and add the sitemap.

Bing Webmaster Tool

Go to Webmaster Tools → Add your site → Fill in the form → Hit Save.

Add a sitemap in the Bing Webmaster Tool

Submitting the Website to Yahoo

As we have already mentioned above, if you get your website to Bing, it will automatically appear on Yahoo.

Thus, submitting your site to search engines will not take you long, but it is a very helpful step for growing your traffic and conversions.

How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)?
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