How to Submit Your Website to Search Engine Directories

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Every website owner at some point, if not at the very beginning, realizes search engine directories as a source of traffic. The good news is that the process of submitting to search engine directories is easier than ever. Just a few years ago, the process of submitting a site to search engines was complicated and took a near magical level of knowledge to make your site show up in search results. Today’s search engines make it easier, but there is some technical knowledge still required. Just like marketing through social media or postcards, most search engine submissions are either free or cost relatively low in comparison to the results you will gain.

The bad news is that all search engines tend to do it a bit differently. There’s no one-stop shop for search engine site submission unless you’re willing to pay a 3rd party to handle this for you. So roll up your sleeves and check out this checklist of things to do to get your site onto search engine directories.

Submission Not Required - Technically

First of all, you don’t have to submit your site to a search engine to start showing up in results. The more sophisticated search engines will find you if other sites link to you. For example, if you register your site with a business directory, the link will show modern search engines that you exist. But this is a haphazard way to do search engine submission.

When you submit your site to a search engine through their official channel, you ensure that your site is being indexed (documented) properly and that all your content is available to the search engines. Just because you currently show up in search results doesn’t mean you don’t need to submit your site to search engine directories.

Major Players

There are only two primary search engines that most websites need to submit their content to and that’s Google and Bing. Yahoo and Bing recently merged their resources, so if you submit to Bing you automatically get Yahoo as well. For a mile-long list of industry specific search engines, check out The Search Engine List.

You can go to each search engine and look for their site submission process, although most use a Webmaster Account process (described below).

Sitemaps

Before jumping into the official site submission process, you need to set up a sitemap for your website. This is a technical document that describes to search engines how your website is organized, the priority of each page, and the date last updated. This is the single most important document you need for accurate and effective search engine site submission.

If you’ve never created a sitemap, don’t worry too much. There are a couple of places you can go to create one for free. You can use free tools like XML-Sitemaps to generate a sitemap for you. Once your sitemap has been generated, the ideal location for you to store the file is in the root directory of your website. For example, www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

You may notice that sitemaps come in a variety of flavors — XML, HTML, XML.GZ, TXT, and others. Just pick one and stick with it. None have a real advantage until you get to the point where you have hundreds of pages, at which point you will want to stick with XML or GZ file types because these are compressed file formats.

Once your sitemap is uploaded to your root directory, it’s time to start submitting to search engines.

Webmaster Account

Google, Bing, and most other major search engines require that a user register as a webmaster to submit a site to their search engine. This process involves either uploading a file, adding some code to your website’s home page, or changing domain records. The easiest and fastest is often simply uploading the provided file and confirming that the file is uploaded, but you can choose whichever method you find best for your needs.

Once you have been confirmed as the webmaster for a website, the next step is to submit your sitemap. This involves simply letting the search engine know where you’ve stored the sitemap on your site.

Each search engine handles your sitemap a bit differently. Some will read it and indicate that your content has been indexed within minutes of site submission. Others can take weeks. The time difference really depends upon the search engine and how many links each search engine already has pointing to your domain.

Check In Occassionally

Once you have your sitemap submitted, you’re done, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to check in once in awhile. Review the pages each search engine has indexed for your site. You may also find that certain pages you do not want to show up in search results is in the list. You can generate a robot.txt to block certain pages from search engines.

If you notice certain pages are not getting indexed, this is where you can check your sitemap to be sure it’s correct or engage in search engine optimization techniques to help search engines find your pages through external links.

While not a magic process anymore, submitting your site to search engines can still be a challenge the first time. But once you know how to generate a sitemap, the process becomes fairly painless. Most search engines allow you to manage multiple websites, so the webmaster account creation is not necessary after the first time. Just confirm you have admin rights on each site you want to manage, upload their respective sitemaps, and you’re set!