Before you can get your website to rank well in the search engines, you need to ensure that search engines can index your website first. This is only for the new websites that are just published online. Search engines will need to index your website for the first time before it can rank your website well, or before you can compete with other websites to get the best ranking for your target keywords. The quickest way to do that is by submitting your website to the search engine. Here are 5 search engine submission tips that will help the search engine to index your website quickly:
1. Submit Your Site to at Least 3 Major Search Engines
There are many search engines available on the internet, with the most popular being Google. But there are also Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and so on. There are many search engines that people are using beside Google. So, it is better for you not to focus only on Google when submitting your website. You should submit your site to at least 3 major search engines, since it will help your website to get indexed quickly.
2. Submit Your Website Only After You Have Enough Content to Offer
If you just purchased a domain name, with only one page of content available on your website, don’t submit your site right away. Instead, fill your website with a lot of content first before you submit it to the search engines. In this way, the search engine will also index your content, instead of just indexing your domain name or your home page. It will also benefit you because if you already have enough content to offer, the search engine can begin to rank your website right away.
3. Submit Your Sitemap as Well
Create a sitemap for your site and submit it to the search engines as well. Your sitemap will act as a blueprint for your website, allowing the search engine spiders to index your website more quickly. This is because when you have a well-structured site organization, the search engine spiders can easily go to your site and index all of your pages without having any difficulty. You will also be required to update your sitemap regularly as you update your website content.
4. Fix Any Problems that Might Prevent the Search Engine From Indexing Your Site
There might be problems that are experienced by the search engines, which might prevent them from indexing your website properly. For instance, if you set a disallow command in your robots.txt file, it will make it difficult for the search engine to index the content that you have. A bad site structure can also contribute to a difficult indexing process, which will affect your SEO negatively. So, be sure to fix any problems that might prevent the search engine from indexing your website properly. You can use a good SEO tool to find and fix such problems.
5. Use The Webmaster Tool to Track Your Progress
Search engines like Google and Bing have webmaster tools that can be used by webmasters to track their indexed website in the search engine. You should use this type of tool to keep tracking your submission progress, as well as to find possible problems in your submission. The webmaster tool will help guide you to the next step, which is very important if you want to rank your website well in the search engine.
Tracey – do you have a link to share on HOW to submit. This is a subject I’m not familiar with so would love to know more.
Thanks Marilyn. To submit to Google, login into your Google account and go to this link: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. To submit to Bing you can go to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url.
Search Console is a very underrated tool. Specifically I would recommend looking into Mobile Usability under Search Traffic and AMP pages under the Search Appearance tab. Google says AMP isn’t a ranking factor but page load speed is and they are continuing to move toward a mobile-first algorithm.
Thanks for added insight Alex 🙂