Submitting Your Website To Search Engines

In order to be Indexed by the Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and other directories you must make the effort of submitting your URL (home page or any other web page on your site) with them.

These four engines are the best to submit to. They are the most popular ad your site information will be shared not only amongst themselves (despite what you may think they share information amongst themselves and others).

	Note: Do not fall for those offers that promise to submit your website to thousands of search engines and directories for a small fee. If you submit your site (or URL) to the few main ones your site will filter down to the others. Just to let you know that the various search engines share information between them. So once you are indexed with one of the main crawlers, then in time you will automatically be indexed by the others. Eventually your site will filter down. The smaller directories get their information from the bigger more powerful search engines.

Google:

To submit your  website to Google visit the following link;

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

With Google you can submit a URL, so you have the flexibility of not only submitting your Home page but you can also submit a few of your internal webpages. The more pages you can get indexed with the crawlers or spiders the better the chances of you showing up on a SERP.

It is also a great way to not restrict the indexing only to your home page and also allowing the robots to visit your site by a page other then the home page, just in case it becomes inaccessible for some reason.

You do not have to submit all your URL's, a few including your home page would suffice, as the search engine will locate your other pages through internal links between your various webpages.

As always start your submission with Google first as it is still the most used search engine.

Yahoo:

With Yahoo you are required to register with them first before you can submit your URL. Yahoo has about 6 directories you can submit to, some of them costs you money and since all of us wants things for free I will not bother with those ones.

Anyway register a free account with Yahoo and then use the link below to submit your URL's. You may also just click on the link and once at the page  you will be requested to register (or sign-in) your account after submission.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Same as Google above, you may submit only one of your URL's (web page) (generally the home page) or several of them. After you have submitted a URL you will be directed to a screen which will give you the option to submit to other Yahoo Directories (as I mentioned previously) if you so wish. Remember some will cost you money.

Bing:

This is Microsoft's Bot (Search Engine), it prefers you submit only your homepage URL (http://www.learnweb101.com) and it will detect the other webpages (URL's) through your internal links.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Ask:

This search engine is very peculiar in that it does not allow you to submit your URL as easily as the other 3 above.

It requires you to create a sitemap (in XML format); once done you then have to Ping them your sitemap URL using the following;

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

The alternative option is to include your sitemap URL within your robots.txt file as such;

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

With the second option you have to wait till the Ask Bot visits your site via another (link) before all your webpages are indexed with them.

According to Ask website here is what they have to say;

"Q: How do I register my site/URL with Ask so that it will be indexed?

A: We appreciate your interest in having your site listed on Ask.com and the Ask.com search engine. Your best bet is to follow the open-format Sitemaps protocol, which Ask.com supports. Once you have prepared a sitemap for your site, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt, or submit the sitemap file directly to us via the ping URL. (For more information on this process, see Does Ask.com support sitemaps?) Please note that sitemap submissions do not guarantee the indexing of URL's."

Once your site is submitted it may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to get indexed. Now the real work begins, promoting and making your site generate some interest, visitors and business for you. You are headed in the right direction.

Trust me the first time you see you website on the search engine it is quite a thrill. You will get there.