Submitting Your Site to Search Engines (How and Why You Should Do It)

Your website has gone live, but you don’t see it on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Now you’re wondering if your site will ever rank high on Google.  

This is a common dilemma that many face, especially for website owners that are just starting to build their own web presence.  

Before finding out why your site has not come up in the search results yet, it’s best to first learn how search engines work.  

In a nutshell, search engines function on the basis of two fundamental processes: crawling and indexing.  

This makes these pages eligible to show up on the SERPs whenever someone searches for the relevant keywords.  

Although most search engines perform the process automatically, crawling and indexing takes some time. If you don’t have the patience, or you simply want to see your website take off as soon as possible, it’s best to put up your website for a manual search engine submission. 

Why should you manually submit your website 

There are a number of reasons a manual website submission is the better choice for you. 

Pace 

While it’s true that search engines will locate your website on the internet sooner or later, there’s no knowing exactly when. Your site might be found in four days, four weeks or in some cases, four months!  

So, unless you’re willing to risk both time and resources, it’s wise to submit your site manually and save you precious time. 

Assurance 

If you leave your site to be discovered by the search engines, they’ll index all information from it as they deem fit. Any important changes in layout, structure, content, or design might be completely overlooked.  

But if you submit your site manually, you can choose pages you want search engines to prioritise.  

Improvement 

The moment you submit your site to a search engine for consideration, you’ll be directed to a Management Dashboard. This is where you are provided with a multitude of tools that can help you test your web page and identify problems if any. You can even update your content and inform the search engine that it needs to crawl once again. 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

With manual submissions, you can gain access to the humongous functionalities of Google, Bing, and Yahoo, which currently hold sway over the search engine market with a combined market share of almost 96%!  

So, are you ready to submit your website to an engine of your choice?  

How to Submit a Website to Google 

Submitting your website to Google is a rather simple task. Before July 2018, Google permitted direct URL submissions to its search engine. But since then, submissions can only be made via Google Search Console.  

All you have to do is:  

1. Locate your Sitemap. Your sitemap is an XML file that lists out all the pages that exist on your website. You’ll find your sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. If it’s not there, try  yourdomain.com/robots.txt. 
2. Once you’ve found your sitemap, go to Google Search Console and click on Select your property. 
3. Click on Sitemaps and paste your sitemap in the URL box provided. 
4. Press the Submit button. 

If you only want to submit an individual page instead of your entire website, you can simply paste that page’s URL in Console’s URL inspection tool.  

This is where you can also find out whether or not Google has indexed your page. 

• If your page has been indexed, you’ll see: URL is on Google 
• If your page has not been indexed, you’ll see: URL is not on Google 

In the case of the latter, you can just click on Request indexing and get the crawling process started! 

How to Submit Your Website to Bing 

 

Quite like Google, Bing too has its own detailed, step-by-step approach of accepting website submissions. Until September 2018, it used to directly accept submissions through its URL submission tool. But since then, its process of submission has completely changed.  

You are now required to:  

• Submit a sitemap on Bing Webmaster Tools. 
• Go to Add Your Site. 
• Fill the form available in absolute detail. 
• Re-check the information you have provided. 
• Click Submit. 

How to Submit Your Website to Yahoo 

The answer, in short, is you don’t submit your website to Yahoo. Yahoo, for the most part, is powered by the same indexes that run Bing. So, if you’ve already submitted your website via Bing Webmaster Tools, it has automatically been submitted to Yahoo as well.  

But if you still want to check, just visit Yahoo after your submission and search for your specific web address. If it shows up, it means it has already been crawled, indexed, and ranked.  

If it doesn’t, you can push the search engine to crawl through your website once again.  

Stay ahead of the game  

The competition in the online market is tight. For your website to have a fair chance of being crawled and indexed, give search engines a nudge and submit your site manually.  

Although your website will be discovered even without a formal submission, a manual submission will certainly increase your possibility of ranking high on the SERPs. Plus, it gives you the opportunity to make frequent changes, trigger content updates, add new keywords, force new crawls, and thereby, enhance your site’s overall value.