Submitting Your Site To The Search Engines

Post Updated: 2nd September 2021

When you first launch your new website it will take a little time before the search engines will get around to indexing your website, however that doesn’t mean you have to sit around waiting for them to find you – you can speed up the indexing process greatly by taking some proactive action and submit your website directly yourself. It is worth the extra effort because it will see the site picked up more thoroughly, and a lot quicker than if you do not submit it. In the online world, the sooner you pick up momentum the more you can increase it.

Most search engine websites will have a simple form to fill in, which simply entails entering the URL of your site and sometimes a few simple comments and keywords explaining what the site is about. Almost instantly, the search engine bots “crawling” software will visit your site and start the process of indexing it, and hopefully within days your site will be appearing in the search engine searches whenever anyone searches for websites or information in your niche.

You have a couple of submission methods available:

1./ Submit Your Site To Search Engines Directly:

Most search engines such as Google and Bing have a URL address for manual submissions. You simply visit this URL and submit your details into the forms (some may require you to register first).

Here are a few of the major search engines submission URLs:

•  Google Search Central (formerly Google Webmaster Central): You will need to sign up for an account, but you will need a Google Webmaster account anyway so you might as well sign up ASAP & submit your sitemap as well. There is also a lot of useful information and tips available to help you understand the basics.
• Bing Webmaster Central: Get your site’s performance data, take advantage of free SEO tools and analyse insights to improve your page rankings on Bing search results. You will need to sign up with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
• Yahoo Site Explorer

2./ Create Your  Sitemap Via another Website:

There are also websites which will create an xml sitemap for your website for free, however I haven’t personally used them so I cannot tell you what they are like, however most I’ve looked at tended to insert their name / website URL into the bottom of the generated sitemap pages…… so I personally wouldn’t use them for that reason alone. This method also would require manual updating every time you publish any new content, so it is far from ideal, but is a useful tool for static HTML websites.

Install a (Manual) Sitemap Extension / Plugin:

For most types of website platform / CMS type (“Content Management System”) there are a range of extensions or plugins available to create and submit your site map, and many of them are completely free. Some of them are completely automated and will “ping” the major search engines whenever you publish any new or updated content, others will create a site map but still require manual submission (or alternatively require collection by the search engines themselves when they visit your site – but will not “ping” the search engines)

Install an Automated “Pinging” Sitemap Generator Plugin:

If you are using WordPress then you are in luck because WordPress has some of the best automated sitemap generator plugins currently available, and what’s more, most if not all are completely free! (and they won’t insert their brand-name into your sitemap URL, either…unless you choose to allow their link). One of the best stand-alone xml sitemap plugins for WordPress was developed by Arne Brachhold (and which is now developed and maintained by By Auctollo) and you can download it via WordPress website – Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

Note too that there are also a couple of variations of this sitemap also available at WordPress and which are made by the same developer, such as one with support for qTranslate plugin, one for Google News websites, Multi-Site compatible, etc.

Another option is to use a SEO plugin, such as the popular Yoast SEO plugin, which has a xml sitemap as part of it’s suite of tools for SEO.