How To Submit A Site To Search Engines Like Google, Bing & Yahoo - Hobo
How To Submit A Site To Search Engines Like Google, Bing & Yahoo
Why Should I Submit My Website to Google, Yahoo And Bing?
Getting listed in Google and the other popular search engines is one of the most effective ways of directing free (or more accurately unpaid), targeted traffic to your website.
Organic traffic is still the most valuable traffic in the world, in 2016, with search engines still rated the most trusted source for finding news and information:
Here are some tips to help you if you’re a beginner to all this.
Table of Contents
What Are The Top Search Engines In the UK To Submit My Site?
The most popular search engines in the UK are Google, with around 90% of the market share, Bing, and Yahoo. All search engines serve nationwide results, based on the reputation of a website and local results, based on the proximity of the user to the business.
Google, for example, has many country-specific engines (e.g. www.google.co.uk) that help Google deliver more accurate results for UK based users.
Connect Your Website To Google & Other Search Engines
I remember the first time I had to add my site to Google. That was many years ago now, but I had no idea how to do it either.
I didn’t know if I had to register my site with search engines in some special way. I didn’t know if I had to add my site to Google myself or pay them to do it for me. It’s simple for me now – so I wrote this to give you a better understanding of the process (which costs nothing).
This ‘how to’ guide is a primer about getting your small business website into Google, Yahoo and Bing….fast, and free.
Google is the principal driver of traffic in the UK. When it comes to submitting your site to thousands of search engines – well, don’t bother.
There is only a handful of players in the UK and most partner with the top global search engines Google and Bing.
Getting your site into search
ranking high in Google, for instance, is another story altogether. I go into both scenarios in this article.
How Do I Check If My Site Is In Google?
Just type your website address into the Google search box. If Google knows about your site, it will tell you. If your site doesn’t feature as the number 1 result, you may need to submit your site to Google. Another way to check if a page is in either of the search engines is to lift a piece of unique text from the page, put it into the search box “in quotes”.
Your page should come up if Google is indexing your site.
Consider also using the info: operator to see if Google knows about your page – e.g. info:www.hobo-web.co.uk or indeed any page from your website site:www.hobo-web.co.uk (Bing too).
In 2016 – I would just put your homepage URL into Google’s search box to ensure Google is serving that page to users. Just being found, and indexed by Google does not mean that your site appears in the main Google results that everyone sees.
Why Can’t I Find My Site In Google?
Search engines like Google need to find your website before it can crawl, index it, rate it and display it in its listings (SERPs – or Search Engine Results Pages).
Googlebot (the spider Google uses) accesses your page if it knows your website exists. Your website can only be listed in Google search if it was crawled and indexed by Googlebot in the first place.
Google may not know about your site, yet.
There are many reasons a site does not rank in Google. My
identifies most of them.
Do I Need To Pay to Get Into Google, Bing or Yahoo?
No. You do NOT have to pay a penny to get your site into any of the major search engines.
You can submit your URL to all the main global search engines entirely for free.
How Do You Submit A Site To Search Engines?
You do not need a SEO (search engine optimizer) to present your site to Google, Yahoo or Bing. You don’t pay to get into any of the big search engines natural (free or organic) listings (and note, Bing powers Yahoo results).
Google has ways of submitting your web pages directly to their index. Most search engines do.
I’d expect submitting your site through the following methods will certainly get you started:
Submit site to DuckDuckGo (Not Available) – ‘It finds you itself‘)
Submit Your Site To Yahoo (No Need – Bing powers Yahoo in 2016)
Submit a site to ASK
How Do I Connect My Site With Google Search Console?
At some point, to rank better in search engines, you are going to have to get other sites to link to it, so you may as well think about that first link on external sites.
In 2016 – that usually means creating useful, accurate and in-depth content that attracts links naturally.
If you want to bypass all that, for now, you can submit your website and verify it in . The procedure to connect your website is very simple with a little technical knowledge.
How Do I Verify A Site with Google Webmaster Tools?
You have a number of options to verify that you own your website:
to your home page (proving that you have access to the source files). To use this method, you must be able to edit the HTML code of your site’s pages.
with the name you specify to your server. To use this method, you must be able to upload new files to your server.
Verify via your . To use this method, you must be able to sign in to your domain name provider (for example,
) or hosting provider and add a new DNS record.
you use to track your site. To use this option, you must be an administrator on the Google Analytics account, and the tracking code must use the new asynchronous snippet.
How Do I Automatically Get New Web Pages Into Google?
You can ping Google (and other engines) using RSS or XML.
If you have a blog, In the past, I’ve found registering a site with FEED BURNER is useful in happy, instant indexing of new content on a site.
If your website publishes an xml sitemap, this is even better. It’s amazing how fast Google indexes and ranks pages.
I’ve seen pages get into Google and rank in the top ten for a phrase in less than 1 minute and I recently tested just how fast Google publishes your content if you’re well connected.
WordPress, for example, pings Google when you post new content, which is very handy with a blogging system. Most modern open source content management systems of note do something like this.
You can add your website direct to Google Webmaster Tools, too.
Do I Need Links for Google To Find My Site?
NO. Historically, the best way to get into Google, and the other top search engines, was for the search engine spider to find your site through a link that was already on another website, which Google already includes in its index.
A link from a blog, forum or another website would usually suffice.
While this is still the case, there are other easier and safer ways to submit your site in 2016.
Any link from another website will do as long as Google sees it as a link ( prevents Google from passing Pagerank and other quality signals – but Google said they might still be used for discovery.).
When it comes to links, you should think how relevant the page is that you want the link from to your website. Does Google rate the web page highly? If not, a link on that site might be ignored.
Many SEO think relevant links are important. I think it’s more important just to .
A link from a reputable website will help Google trust your site more. Ranking high or even
often comes down to
and the quality of sites that link to you. , in this rank calculation).
If you submit your website to cheap directories or buy links to get into Google, these links can
in the future. You could be effectively penalised, or removed from Google’s results entirely.
In 2016, the simple truth is, you hardly even need a link for Google to find your website. Google (especially) WILL find your domain within days or weeks, and if your website has unique content on it – it will go into its index quickly.
It will probably rank high for a little while too. Then drop down the rankings a bit. A ‘honeymoon period’. Maybe it’s to give you a taste of Google traffic – or perhaps it is to determine which quality standards your site fails to meet.
Should I Submit My Site To Directories?
You could, of course, think about submitting your site to directories.
There are some good quality directories out there. A link in ONE OR TWO of these directories will probably get your site into search engines.
Unfortunately, there is a LOT of low-quality links you will probably stumble upon first. That kind of backlink can quickly turn toxic – and too many of them can cause you problems.
I would AVOID all low cost, cheap SEO submission services, especially those based around submitting your site to directories.
Often pointless and often risky.
Which Paid or Free Search Engine Submission Tools and Services Should I Use?
I was talking to someone who recently paid a website submission company to submit their site to lots of different search engines.
It’s easy to forget many are ignorant to what seems, to the experienced, an obvious waste of money. I was looking at some free of the free search engine submission tools available recently and a great many of them are simply lead generation tools to get your email address.
You put your website into the tool with your email, and this company has now been alerted you need SEO services.
If you’re lucky, you’ll only receive the odd unsolicited email.
If you’re unlucky, you’ve just been added to a spam list to be forever bombarded with low-quality SEO services, directory submission services, penguin proof link building strategies and emails telling you about undetectable link networks and the latest traffic exploding WordPress plugin.
If you are being told about most of these services in an unsolicited manner – there’s nothing private or undetectable about them.
If you do use any of them – point those links at a minisite (and not your main site) because they won’t last forever (if at all) and Google is getting serious penalising sites who buy and sell links using these services.
Search engine submission has not been a priority for most SEO I mix with because they know the search engines that matter (and are relevant) do a good job of finding a new site by themselves – and there are many documented ways of getting a page into Google, Yahoo and Bing, for instance. You do not need any company to do this for you – for instance, there’s pretty decent documented evidence (and observations made) that Google Plus can be helpful getting your site into Google.
You can submit your site to search engines yourself, for free, anytime you want. Your site should be plugged into relevant search engine offerings (like Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Places and Google Plus, for a start).
I don’t ever recall a decent site not being indexed pretty quickly by all the main search engines, and that’s without bothering even with the above services from the engines.
Invest your money instead in building the online reputation of your website and making your pages richer, and more relevant, and seek to keep people on your site, when you get them. Don’t submit your website to sites where you do not know where the link will appear or you are probably in unnatural links territory.
You can use our
to quickly audit your website and check against some SEO best practices.
Why Is My Website Not Listed in Google Search WEEKS or MONTHS After Submitting It?
If your website is not in Google (at all) after a few weeks (or months) of doing the above on a few sites (don’t spam), then something might be wrong. Instructions in HTML may be blocking Google from indexing your website, for instance.
You can FETCH THE WEBSITE AS GOOGLE in Google Webmaster tools to make sure everything is ok.
If Google can access your site, you probably need to review your content and .
Now you’ve learned how to submit a website to search engines, the real fun begins!
Check out our SEO tutorial for beginners here.
Find out , and the
you should be using.
Can Social Media Links Get My Site Indexed by Search Engines?
If you do a lot of it.
Google certainly spiders Twitter, Facebook (when it can) and Google Plus – and links on these websites often spread to other places –
so creating a profile on these websites sometimes works to help a website get into these search engines.
I have also read that Bing spiders Facebook pages too (they have an agreement with FB). Social media links are often ‘nofollowed’, though, so they often do not count as a ‘vote’ to your website, so I would not rely on them.
How Do Search Engines Work Out Where My Website Ranks?
Before you try to add your site to the search engines, you should understand what they look for when they decide how to rank your site.
Just because you’re website is listed in Google doesn’t mean you’ll get traffic. You need to make sure your site is search engine ready or search engine friendly.
The general understanding is that most engines use a “formula” to determine intent, keyword relevancy, online reputation and site quality.
The technical term is called an “algorithm”, and each search engine has its own unique algorithm (s) that it uses to rank pages.
Generally, this ‘magic’ formula consists of your page title, text content and the number and quality of links pointing back to your site, etc, etc.
Some say Google uses over 200 signals to rank a page, all weighted differently, at any one time – and Google likes this flux. It makes manipulating their index more difficult.
It’s important to note that every engine is different.
Some may look at , some may ignore them and just place emphasis on your body content. These days, most metadata is becoming less and less important, and often ignored.
Because of SPAM abuse, many search engines no longer use these tags to help rank pages, but you should still include them because they do use them to display information about your site.
For example, whatever is inside the
is often, but not always, the resource the search engine will use as the title of your page in the search results snippet. The easiest way to get into all the major search engines is to be linked to from a site that already appears in, for instance, Google and Yahoo and Bing, and social signals certainly play a part in discovery of new pages and sites.
How Do I Improve My Ranking Position in Google?
There are a few ways I can think of getting into Google, and improving your rankings.The best way to improve your rankings is to get a link from a reputable website to your website.
The best way to improve your rankings is to get a link from a reputable website to your website. Yes, that’s all you need to do. Google likes finding new sites “itself”, and it does this by spidering links from website to website, and eventually ranks pages on the quality and number of those links.
If you want to improve your rankings, try and get a link from an “authority” site in your industry, or exchange a few links with other businesses or suppliers in your line of work, perhaps not direct competitors. One link from a very well trusted site in your niche can improve how much trust Google has in your website, but they want you to create ‘buzz’ about your site, rather than build links in a mechanical fashion. Editorial links from media sites also still carry a lot of weight in 2016.
If you cannot think at all how to get a link you can add your site to Google directly, via the links above, or via Google Webmaster Tools, or Google Plus and Google Places.
Remember to know search engine rules, and if you are interested in learning about SEO….
Will Google Find New Pages on My Site?
Don’t worry about telling Google about new pages on your site once your site is indexed and appearing in Google. Google is very good at finding new content. Google loves fresh content, and if you publish lots of it on your blog, and it’s of a decent quality, Google will visit your site often, and rank your content for free.
A while back I tested what happens when publishing NEW content to a website already IN Google. I know (generally) what to expect but it’s always good to have a peak every now and again. I use WordPress, RSS & Feedburner (pinging Google Blog search) to instantly syndicate the Hobo articles so I expect a few things to happen:
Get into Google SERPs in a few minutes
Disappear for a while again
Come back into the SERPs & stabilise
Get Cached by Google
So how long did it take to index my new page when I pressed publish, and what happened to the page in SERPs:
My Feedreader (instantly – though there can be a delay sometimes)
Google Blog Search (15 minutes)
Google SERPs (30 minutes – so Google knows about it)
1 hour UK position 25
12 Hours later top 10 UK
Cache accessible within @18 hours, I can access it use using the info:command, but the cache is not available in the SERPs yet
A few days later Google dropped it from the SERPs as expected. Today it seems to be back on page 2 of Google.
During this period the page is not even returned in a site: command but it is using the page info:command.
This is all down to the way Google handles CERTAIN fresh up-to-date content – see . If you get a handle on it, you see why a little online business authority and being first with the news is KEY to getting traffic out of Google.
I’ve got 12,000 visits from Google alone in just over 24 hours fiddling with that – but you’ve got to be fast out of the traps. This is also why publishing fresh content on your site is seen to be such an important strategy for SEO success.
Those rankings above stabilised n the first page, and longer term ranking success will ultimately depend a lot on the ‘authority’ or ‘domain trust’ of this site, the relevance of my page title, the content and over time, how well linked it is within this site (which a lot of people forget about) as I don’t really expect too many incoming links to the page. Of course, rankings will also depend on how well ‘optimised’ the competition is for the term.
See here for more Geek stuff on .
Note – In a recent test in October 2014, I saw an article indexed within 1 second (albeit with an incorrect timestamp of 3 hours caused by differences in time formats/geolocation settings)
How To Put Your Company Logo On Google SERPs
You can now put your company logo on search results using simple code, placed on the home page of your website:
Today, we’re launching support for the schema.org mark-up for organization logos, a way to connect your site with an iconic image. We want you to be able to specify which image we use as your logo in Google search results. Using schema.org Organization mark-up, you can indicate to our algorithms the location of your preferred logo. For example, a business whose homepage is
can add the following mark-up using visible on-page elements on their homepage. This example indicates to Google that this image is designated as the organization’s logo image for the homepage also included in the mark-up, and, where possible, may be used in Google search results. Mark-up like this is a strong signal to our algorithms to show this image in preference over others, for example when we show Knowledge Graph on the right hand side based on users’ queries. GOOGLE
Very easy to implement – just add the following code to your home page.
&div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"&
&a itemprop="url" href="/"&Home&/a&
&img itemprop="logo" src="/logo.png" /&
It’s probably past time to implement some more of this, too, and feed the Google beast:
How Do I Submit a URL To Google Local Business Results?
Local SEO rankings are powered (in part) by Google’s local business directory, and can be improved by submitting your site to Google and telling them everything about your company.
Local business results for your business are only shown when there are searchers at a location near to your business or are specifically searching for your service in your area. Google will promote the most popular, most connected, most relevant and most trusted businesses in the local area to the top of SERPs. Sometimes this is in ‘local box’ style listings, other times, Google will merge local results with global results (since the advent of the VENICE algorithm change).
Submit Your Site to Google Maps, Google Places for Business and Google+ Local
Google Local Business listings, now known as Google Places for Business and Google+ Local (leading to lots of confusion) get your business (and website) featured for various keyword phrases, ESPECIALLY in your local area, as well as your business name, including a map to your business and contact details.
It’s FREE, so your crazy not to do it.
How To Improve Your Ranking in Google Local Business Results
In my experience, giving Google as much information as possible about your business is just about the best policy. Get listed in as many local business directories as possible. Encouraging positive reviews on your profiles all improves your standing in this index. Local business rankings are calculated differently from natural results but often BLENDED with them, if Google can detect your location).
Best Practices for Google Places (From Google)
Only business owners or authorized representatives may claim their business listings on Google Maps.
Use a shared, business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing.
If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.hobo-web.co.uk, a matching email address would be me@hobo-web.co.uk.
The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name.
Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business into the business name.
Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
The address should look exactly the way you’d write it on a paper mailing envelope. If your business services several areas, you can create one listing under a PO Box.
Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
Businesses that operate in a service area as opposed to a single location should not create a listing for every city they service. Service area businesses should create one listing for the central office of the business only.
Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.
Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center.
Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location.
Do not provide URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, address or category fields.
Please see this page of the LBC User Guide for examples of acceptable custom attributes.
If you are a small business or a brand new business just starting out, you should claim your listing. It’s 100% free and gives you a measure of increased visibility on Google if folks are looking for your type of business in your area. Here’s a link to more information on Google Places for Business
and Google Plus ?. Google will very probably be using its products to find new pages (and that includes the Chrome browser and maybe even Gmail.)
Get More Traffic
Connecting your website with search engines is one thing. Getting lots of traffic and sales is another thing altogether. I can review your website and tell you exactly what you need to do to make more money with your website.
Company No. SC299002 |
VAT No.880 5135 26 |
Business hours are 09.00 a.m. to 17.00 p.m. Monday to Friday
Local Time is
Moderated by . . . . .
How To SEO Your Site in 2016
Join over 20,000 fans and download your free SEO training guide.}