Welcome to part 7 of our 10-part series on SEO! In part 6 we talked about how important human testing is in relation to building a navigable, clean, informative website. Today we will discuss how and where to submit your website, while clearing up the many misconceptions people have about making submissions.
Submitting Your Website to Search Engines
Submitting your site to search engines is probably one of the least crucial aspects of SEO; however, it is the one that people most often misunderstand. Here are some erroneous beliefs about submitting your website to search engines:
- You need to continuously submit your website to keep it indexed.
- You must submit your site to every search engine (thousands) to get any kind of traffic at all.
- Submitting your site regularly will boost your rank.
None of these are true! And the people who make these claims are simply trying to make a buck by taking advantage of the uninformed. You, however, are not uninformed and will not fall for these scams!
Most search engine traffic does not come from thousands of different search engines, but rather from a select few – specifically Google, Bing, and Yahoo! According to comScore, here is the breakdown of the U.S. Search Market as of December 2011:
- Google: 65.4%
- Microsoft (Bing): 15.0%
- Yahoo!: 15.1%
- Ask: 2.9%
- AOL: 1.6%
Obviously, we can see that it would not be a good idea to pay someone to submit your site to “hundreds” or even “thousands” of search engines! The only search engines that matter are Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines
The only search engines you need to submit to are Google, Bing, and Yahoo! As soon as your website launches you’ll want to submit your website only once to each of them. Here are the links on where to submit your website on these search engines.
Google Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools
*Please note, Bing now handles the webmaster tools for Yahoo! When you submit your site to Bing, you’ll be covered by both Bing and Yahoo!
Is it Important to Submit to Search Engines?
Most webmasters would insist that submitting to search engines is a waste of time. Without an online presence, i.e. good content and links, a website will not rank on a search engine whether or not it has been “submitted.” On the other hand, search engines are always crawling the web, searching for new, relevant, quality content. If they crawl your site and like what they find, they will automatically index your site and list it in their rankings.
The lesson here is spend less time “submitting” and more time building links, improving the quality of your content, and paying attention to other elements that actually boost SEO. As a standard practice, we submit all of our clients’ sites to the two webmaster tools, but we don’t do it so much to get them indexed and ranked. Instead, we do it so we can take advantage of the analytical data these webmaster resources provide.
Links To The 10-Part SEO Series on How To Rank on Google
Part 1: SEO Success Starts With Keyword Research
Part 2: Why Producing Quality Content for SEO Is Important
Part 3: Structuring Your Website For SEO
Part 4: Content Optimization for SEO
Part 5: Internal Linking Strategies for SEO
Part 6: Human Testing for SEO Success
Part 7: Search Engines Submissions for SEO
Part 8: Link Building for SEO
Part 9: Monitoring Your SEO Efforts
Part 10: Extra Tools & Resources for SEO Success
