Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Before Submitting to a Search Engine

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

The importance of Sitemaps

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee a high ranking and/or listing. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day. It may take quite sometime before they take up your website for review by human editors. One important factor to remember is to include a site map of your website. This makes crawling easier for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without site maps. If using WordPress, plug-ins like SEO Yoast or Google XML Sitemaps can generate your site map.

Similar to an index for a book. A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos and other files on your website. As well as the relationships between them. Search engines read this file when they crawl your website. They then use it to create an index based on your pages, blog post titles, categories and tags. For a more detailed explanation read How Search Engines Work – Web Crawlers.

Webmaster Tools

Bing – Webmaster Tools and Google’s Webmaster Tool Search Console where you can then submit your site. Google also has a free webmaster course for the novice you can check out here. By submitting your site to Bing you are also submitting it to Yahoo at the same time. Bing now manages Yahoo searches and site indexing.