Everyone uses the internet to accomplish simple tasks, like ordering a pizza or finding out movie times. More often than not, it involves using search engines. Whenever a user decides to search for something online using a search engine, they often only click the first few links that are presented to them. For businesses, this means everyone is competing to get to the top of search results.

Brand-new websites are often overlooked and won’t even be found in search results. Before making it into the first couple of pages of a major search engine, the first step is to submit your website to them. Below, we’ll outline how you can submit your site to search engines like Google and Bing, and what it can mean for your business.

 

URL Submission

You can manually submit your website to both Google and Bing through their URL submission page, which simplifies the process. For smaller sites, you can quickly submit your website with ease.

However, you can only submit one URL at a time. For companies with large sites, submitting a considerable number of pages through this method can be time-consuming. Luckily, there are other ways to submit your website.

 

Google/Bing Webmaster Tools

Search engines like Google and Bing have anticipated that businesses will want to submit their websites and have made the process much simpler. Google/Bing webmaster tools allow site owners to scan and submit multiple pages at once by simply submitting a sitemap.

Another benefit of using webmaster tools is that Google and Bing are able to calculate things such as change frequency (how frequently a page is likely to change), last modified date (when the last page was changed in any way), and priority (how important you deem one page on your site over another). All of this data is collected by Google and Bing and helps with your page ranking. You can find the Webmaster Tools here:

If you don’t have a sitemap, or you need to create one, feel free to use a sitemap generator. For a sitemap that best suits this topic, we recommend using an XML sitemap generator like:

 

What now?

Now that you have submitted your website, what’s next? It’s fairly difficult to get your website to the top of search results, or even on the first page, right away. In reality, simply submitting your site and hoping it reaches the first couple of pages is unrealistic. No matter how old your site is, it might never make it that far. Instead, you should be looking to improve your website’s SEO, and if you’re using WordPress, making sure it’s optimized for search engines.

While Google takes many things into consideration when ranking pages, one of the largest factors it looks at are links. In most cases, the more backlinks you have on your site, the better your ranking is. Essentially, Google counts links as a “vote”. If they see two pages with similar content, it will look towards the number of links to decide which one should be ranked higher. When you’re up against a site with similar ranking, the page or site with more links will usually win.

Other aspects of SEO still apply, but links will usually put you on top against your competition. It’s also important to note that all of this is only part of the equation. At the end of the day, you also need to have high-quality content that generates views in the first place.

If you have any questions about submitting your site to search engines, or about SEO in general, let us know in the comments below!