Submit Your Website to Search Engines

The first step to getting your site online and to get better rankings in Google is to submit your URL to search engines. An example of an URL is www.yoursite.com. Eventually the search engines will find your site but this will help expedite the process.

Once you submit your URL, it could take several days, weeks, or months for the search engines to index your page(s). Results may vary so don’t write this in stone. Factors such as other websites pointing to your site can affect this time as well.

1. Go to the following link: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
2. Type in your URL, example: http://www.yoursite.com
3. Enter comments about your site. This is optional. Usually I enter the genre of the site and a few keywords. Example: Website design in Hollister, CA.
4. Enter the captcha text shown in the box
5. Select “Add URL”

1. Go to the following link: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
2. Enter the captcha text shown in the box
3. Type in your URL, example: http://www.yoursite.com
4. Select “Submit URL”

**UPDATED NOVEMBER 2012**

1. Go to the following link: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
2. Click on “Submit Your Site for Free”
3. You will be redirected to Bing. Follow the on-screen instructions for submitting your URL.

**UPDATED AUGUST 2012**

Ask does not have an URL submit feature. Until recently, you could submit your sitemap to them. But Ask.com has now retired this feature and says they will be crawling sites instead. So, the next best thing is to add a directive in your robots.txt file that specifies auto-discovery of the XML sitemap.

Like this:

SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL.

That’s it! Once you complete the above steps, just sit back and be patient. It takes time for the search engines to index your pages. If you submit more than once, some search engines may consider this spamming which could result in not indexing your site at all.

Using an automated submission program to submit to multiple search engines at once may be considered spam attempts and is frowned upon by search engines such as Google.

Also note that you do not have to add all of your URL addresses for your entire site. For example, you do not need to add http://www.yoursite.com/about.hml and http://www.yoursite.com/contact.hml. Simply enter the home page URL and let the engines do the rest.