Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
There are a large number of sites out there that will claim to submit your website to tens of thousands of search engines for a few dollars.
Really? Submit your website to 10,000’s of search engines?
Sound’s great doesn’t it, almost too good to be true? A few dollars to submit your website to all these search engines? Web traffic will go through the roof!
Yeah you guessed it, it is basically a scam.
Where should you submit your website?
The only search engines you realistically need to submit your website to are the following:
- Bing/Yahoo
- Yandex
Approximately 98% of all search engine traffic comes from a combination of these big three search engines. That means that just 2% of web traffic is left for the rest of the search engines.
If you take the figure of one of these website submission companies that will submit your website to 10,000 search engines, that means you are getting, each for search engine they submit to, just 0.0002% of the search coverage available. Even for a few dollars, is it worth it?
So how do you submit your website to the big three?
It is surprisingly simple to get your website out there and have potential visitors find your website when carrying out searches.
So after reading the search engine statistics above, you now know that it is not worth paying someone or some company to submit your website to a whole bunch of pointless search engines. You just need to go ahead and get your site onto the big three. But how?
Create a Sitemap
Creating a sitemap is critical. If you are using WordPress, there is a good chance that you are using Yoast SEO. If you are not, get it installed as it is the best SEO plugin available in my own humble opinion.
What I’m getting at is that Yoast SEO will automatically create your sitemap for you. You can then use that sitemap and submit it to the big three search engines.
But, what if you do not want to use Yoast SEO or your website is not using a WordPress platform?
Well, then in that case, life is a little more difficult. However, there are plenty of websites out there that will automatically create your sitemap for you. Here are just a few:
- XML Sitemaps
- Webmaster World
- Website Map
- Let Me Google That For You
So once you have your sitemap XML, you are ready to get going and start the submission process to Google, Bing and Yandex.
Submit your website to Google
The first thing you are going to need is a Google account. As this is Google and not Big Bad John’s Search Engine, I’m going to assume that you already have a Google account so we will move on.
Head over to the Google Webmaster Tools website and click the option to sign in. Once you have signed in you should click on the Add a Property button in the top right of the page:
A pop-up will appear and you should then enter your website address and click the Add button:
Verify your Website
This will then take you to the verification area where you will have to prove that you own the site that you are trying to submit.
Go ahead and choose an option that best suits your site and complete the verification process.
Submit your Sitemap
Once you are fully verified, you can now browse through the options and features within the Google Search Console. But what you need to do now is to submit your sitemap so that GoogleBot can find your website and crawl all your pages.
To do this, click on Crawl and then Sitemaps from the left side menu:
This will then take you into the sitemap area of your Google Search Console. At the top right of the page, you will see an Add/Test Sitemap button.
You then need to enter your sitemaps URL. The first part of the mail URL will be pre-populated so you just need to enter the name of your sitemap and click the Submit button:
Then that is pretty much all you need to do. The GoogleBot will then follow your sitemap and crawl your site. Give it a few days and your site will start appearing on Google search results.
Submit your website to Bing
So you have submitted your site to Google and now its time to move onto your sites submission to Bing.
As with Google, you will need a Microsoft, Facebook or Google account to login to the Bing Webmaster Tools website. Once you have logged in, it will take you straight to the Bing Search Console. At the top left of the page, you will see the Add a Site section:
Enter your website URL and click on the Add button. This will then take you to the next page where you need to enter your sitemap URL:
If you want to, you can select from the drop down regarding when you receive your most amount of traffic in the day. Once you are happy with the settings you have selected, click on the Add button.
Verify your website
This will then take you to the verification page. This is similar to what you carried out on the Google verification. Choose the best option for you and complete the process.
You will then see that your sitemap is now pending:
The BingBot will then go out and crawl your website and all its pages within your sitemap.
Submit your website to Yandex
You will have now submitted your website to two of the big three search engines. This leaves you with the final one – Yandex.
This is a Russian search engine and one of the biggest technology companies in Russia. This exposes your website to a whole new market area, not just in Russia, but in countries like Turkey, Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic countries.
Yandex is also the forth largest search engine in the world, only behind Google, Baidu (Chinese search engine) and Bing. In case you are wondering why we have not included Baidu in this guide, it is because it is all in Chinese and we can’t work it out! But if you do understand Chinese, you should go ahead and add your website to that search engine too.
So let’s move on to getting your website submitted to the Yandex search engine.
As with the other search engines, you will need to login to the Yandex Webmaster Tools site. Once logged in, at the top left of the screen you will see the option to add a site:
Click on the + button to go ahead and start the process to add your site. You will then hit a page asking you to enter your website URL:
Once you have entered your websites URL, go ahead and click on the Add button.
Verify your website
Like with Google and Bing, you will need to verify that you own the website that you are trying to add. You have three options to do this; meta tag, HTML file or DNS record.
Submit your sitemap
Once you have verified your website, you should then click Indexing then Sitemap files on the menu on the left hand side. Then add the full URL of your sitemap into the text box and click on the Add button:
This will then submit your sitemap to Yandex and the YandexBot will carry out a crawl of your website just like the GoogleBot and BingBot.
Conclusion
That is about all you have to do. Now you wait for the various search bots to crawl your website and get added to their search results. This should not take very long and you should see your website gaining traffic from these search engines within a week.
Feedback
We would love to hear your feedback on this article so come and join us on Facebook or Twitter and let us know what you think!
Share this content:
