How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines For Maximum Visibility?
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Can you guess how the websites were indexed in the early days? In the 90s, when search engines were young, website submission was one of the primary ways to ensure that the website was getting indexed. But these days, with so much advancement in the SEO documentation structure, search engine submission has now become just an unnecessary formality.
Google, Bing, and other popular search engines have added several features to their algorithm that help them crawl and index websites quickly. Still, if you want to know how to submit the website to search engines? Here are the ways to do so:
Is It Necessary to Submit the Website to a Search Engine?
Although search engine submission has its own set of benefits, this step is not at all mandatory to perform. The reason behind this is that search engines are very much capable of finding the site by themselves. If you have built the site with all the crucial elements like proper use of keywords, interlinking pages, etc., then popular search engines like Google will easily scan and rank it.
Google keeps on crawling the new pages and sites until it finally decides which ones to show. If you want to submit your website, here are the reasons why you should do so:
- It makes it faster for Google to crawl your website. This way, you can easily attract more investors and customers to your business.
- Allows Google to have a better understanding of the website’s structure
How Can You Submit a Website to a Search Engine?
You will be required to have a sitemap for submitting your website. A sitemap is a file stored on the server with all the website’s important information. The search engines look into a sitemap and check out your content. Those using CMS (content management system) like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix, don’t have to worry about creating a sitemap. These CMS systems generate the sitemap on their own. As for WordPress sites, plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math help in generating a full-fledged XML sitemap for the consumption of search engines.
Enter the URL into the browser, and you will see a page consisting of all the URLs. Somewhat like this:
Submitting the Website to Google
When you are done getting a sitemap URL, the next thing is to head over to the Google Search Console.
P.S.:( For first-time users, please verify the site before going further.)
Click on the “Sitemaps” option on the left side of the main Google Search Console dialog box. Next, go to the ‘add a new sitemap” heading and fill in the sitemap URL details. After you are done, click on the “Submit” button.
Submitting the Website to Bing
For submitting the website over Bing, you would still be required to have a sitemap URL. Afterward, go to the Bing Webmaster tools and check out “Sitemaps” on the left side. After filling in all the information, tap on the “Submit Sitemap” button.
Submitting Website to Yahoo
The search engine of Yahoo is powered by Bing. That’s why you cannot submit your website to Yahoo. If you try to do so, Yahoo will take you directly to the Bing Webmaster Tools.
You have to submit the site to Bing. Once the Bing Webmaster tool has indexed the website, it will appear in the Yahoo search results.
Submitting the Website to DuckDuckGo
There is no manual submission feature in the DuckDuckGo search engine. Instead, it mainly uses the data submitted from all of Bing’s indexes. So, just like Yahoo, the result on DuckDuckGo will also be determined with all the data you put into the Bing webmaster tool.
Submitting the Website to Yandex
Submitting a website on Yandex is quite similar to how it is done on Google and Bing.
Verify the website on Yandex Webmaster Tools; next, hit on the “Indexing” option on the menu column on the left side. After this, additional menu items will appear, and then select “Sitemap files.”
Paste the sitemap URL and click on “Add.”
How to Check Whether the Website is Indexed or Not?
The best and quickest way to search out whether your website is indexed is to search it using the query: “site:thewebsitename.com”
This way, you can check out whether Google indexed your website or not. In case you want to check out whether an individual webpage was indexed or not, you can enter the URL into the search section at the top of the Google screen and then press Enter.
You will get the URL inspection tool, where you can see the status of the webpage that you entered. Once it is done, you can see whether your page is indexed or not. In case it’s not indexed you can go to the “Request Indexing” option and get it done.
To check the status of all the web pages in one go, you can check the Index Coverage Report. Click on the “pages” link in the Index section column on the left side of the page. One can also view all the indexed and not indexed pages at a glance. By clicking on the “Not Indexed” category, you can view all the pages that Google has not indexed.
To check whether the website is indexed over Bing, one can check out the Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Open up the Bing Webmaster Tools and click on the Site Explorer Option.
- A drop-down menu appears in the upper left corner.
- Click on “Filter by Indexed URLs.”
This is how you can check out the Indexed and Non-Indexed pages over Bing.
How to Fix Indexing Troubles?
If your website or any pages are not indexed, you should check why it isn’t. You must understand where you are going wrong to fix the issue. For this, you have to paste the URL on Google’s URL Inspection Tool or Google Analytics and see where the error is occurring.
The common issues that might appear are:
- Robots.txt might have blocked the website or page: Google cannot crawl websites or pages that the robots.txt has blocked. So, you would first have to remove the block for indexing the page and website.
- Indexing a duplicate page: If Google believes that the page you want to index has duplicate content, your website and page might not get indexed. However, with a little investigation, you can sort out the issue.
- The page is redirected: Google does not index any redirected page. If you want to index the page remove the redirect.
Is It Necessary to Use the Website Submission Service?
It is not required to pay for a search engine submission service. One can submit their website to search engines easily, free of cost, and faster by themselves. Some website submission services might claim to put your website on the best of the search engines and directories.
But this is not true.
A majority of people use Google as their primary search engine tool. That’s why it becomes quite important for your website to be submitted over there. But here is the thing, Google does not like when people use website submission services.
You are actually paying others to link to the website by using the submission service. If Google catches any websites doing so, the website can get penalized. The consequence will be the webpage will show right at the bottom of the Google search result.
To sum up, it’s better to stick to the old-school ways of submitting the website rather than going with the website submission service.
What More Should You Do Than Submit a Website?
Once the user puts in the data on the Google search bar, thousands of results appear on the SERP. But usually, people only click on the first page and never see the rest of the results. This is why more than search engine submission is needed.
To have website traffic, you also need to look through all the other aspects, like the usage of target keywords. However, ranking on the first page isn’t enough. If your page lacks the appropriate information, most people will drive away from your website, lowering your ranking.
So, there are plenty of things apart from submitting the website that you should take care of apart from submitting your website to search engines.
Key Takeaway:
In a nutshell, the chances of Google and other search engines finding your website on their own are quite irrespective of the fact whether you submit it or not. But there are a few benefits of search engine submission that will be highly beneficial for you.
By submitting your website to search engines, you are providing additional information for your site.
- You may also get site links in return.
- In case you made changes to the content pages and want to rank for some other keywords, submitting a website can help google crawl the fresh content faster.
Search engine submission may be one of many tasks for increasing a website’s traffic. But it’s not at all a necessary step to take. Search engines will anyhow crawl and index your website, even if you have not submitted it.
