How to Submit Website to Search Engines

Search engines like Google and Bing use their indexing bots to crawl random web pages and record their content. This process is automatic, so unless you explicitly forbid search engines from indexing your website, they will eventually find it. However, it may take a while. How to speed it up?

Submitting your website to search engines

With around 380 new websites created every minute, even the estimated number of websites built every day is enormous and the process of indexing all of them takes months. There’s also no guarantee that robots will find all the pages.

To quickly inform search engines about the existence of your website, just search for „Google add URL“ or „Bing add URL“. Among the first few results, you will find all the necessary links.

Still, it’s much more effective to connect your website directly to the chosen search engine through its own service. For Google, use their free and user-friendly tool Google Search Console.

How to add a website to Search Console

You can set up everything in only four simple steps:

1. Sign up to Search Console and create a property for your website.
2. Log in to your Webnode website builder and add the HTML code from Search Console to the header of your homepage.
3. Verify the connection in Search Console.
4. Add your site map to Search Console to simplify the indexing of future pages.

Find our detailed guide, that will walk you through the whole process. Search Console offers several handy features that will make it worth the extra work:

It helps make your website Google-friendly

You can see if there are any pages with errors that need to be fixed or pages that, for some reason, can’t be crawled by Google robots.

You can ask Google to inspect a specific URL to see if it was already indexed, crawled or if the page is mobile-friendly. Use this “URL inspection tool” whenever you create a new page to make sure it will be noticed, but not before you’re sure it’s full of great content. You don’t want Google to form a poor opinion about the new page.

If Google suspects that there is something shady happening with your website, which might cause harm to others (such as malware, phishing attempts, hacked website), you will see a notification about it in Search Console.

If you’ve started working on your internal link-building after reading our article about the importance of links on your website, Search Console will show you your most linked pages and the number of internal links leading to them. To keep track of the external links, you can analyze a list of links leading to your website and check out the top linking sites.

It reveals a lot about website’s performance

This might easily be the best out of the Search Console features. You can see for which keywords your website gets displayed in search results, the number of impressions, clicks and the average position of pages in those results. You can significantly improve your website’s performance if you regularly watch and act on this data.

As we’re writing this article, Search Console is also experimenting with the report which will show you whether the loading speed of your pages is slow, moderate or fast. Combine it with Google’s PageSpeed Insights and you won’t have to worry about losing visitors because of the slow response time.

Where else to register

Besides search engines, there are also different online catalogs where people can browse through lists of companies or similarly themed websites. They’re usually called website directories. Since some of them are endorsed or even created by search engines, registration in them might bring you a good number of new visitors.

Let’s mention at least the two major ones:
Google My Business
Bing Places for Business

There are also hundreds of smaller and local directories. If you want to register with them, make sure they are of good quality. Otherwise, it might seem like your website follows the same questionable standards.

What you should remember

Actively inform search engines about new and updated pages on your website to make sure they will notice all the changes. If you combine it with a regular check-up of the data collected in Google Search Console, you’re well on your way towards a successful website.

1. Introduction
2. Basic principles and recommendations
3. Where to begin? (content, target group, competitors, own domain)
4. SEO settings in the Webnode website builder
5. Links on your website
6. Submitting your site to search engines
7. SEO and social media
8. Data Analysis (study your visitors)
9. Mobile first indexing

Want to know how to do SEO? We have a detailed SEO guide for you.