Learn How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines

Search engines help users find the most relevant websites for a particular topic. Google, Bing and other search engine sites are pretty good at finding new websites on their own, but you can give them a helping hand by submitting a sitemap. Learn how to submit a website to search engines below.

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What is a Sitemap

A sitemap is a complete list of pages available on your website. Search engines don't need to discover everything piece by piece when they visit. They go through the sitemap to quickly add these listings to their search engine results.

Sitemap Submission Tools

A sitemap generator streamlines the process of putting together a list of your pages. You end up with a file in XML format, which the search engine crawls to learn more about your website.

While many third party tools address this need, they all operate on the same principle. These solutions structure your site content and create a list that's easy and fast for the search engines to scan.

You don't have to use any tools for this step if you don't want to. Manually creating a sitemap is a viable option, albeit a time consuming one. However, most tools are user-friendly and capable of putting together your page in minutes.

How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines

Now that you have a sitemap, you need to get it in front of prominent search engines. Start by uploading the sitemap.xml file to your website. Your web host may provide you with a file manager, or you can use a File Transfer Protocol application. Now that your sitemap is on your server, you can get to work on sending it to Google and Bing.

Google

Google's Search Console provides webmasters with an easy way to submit newly created sitemaps. When you're ready to show your website to the world, sign up for Google Search Console by filling out the form on this page.

Once you're logged in, click "Crawl" from the options on the left sidebar. Choose the "Sitemaps" menu option. Click the button labeled "Add Sitemap" in the upper right corner of the screen. Input the URL associated with the sitemap and click "Submit."

If you want to make sure that it's working properly before you send it to Google, use the "Test" option on this page. Once you successfully send your sitemap, your pages will start to show up in the search index. The Google Search Console will inform you if any errors or problems are detected with your submission.

Bing

Register for an account at Bing's Webmaster Tools page to get this process started. Once you're logged in, click "Sitemaps" from the navigation menu. Enter the full web address of your sitemap into the form in the lower right corner. Click "Submit" to send this information to Bing.

Your search engine listing plays an important role in the success or failure of your website. You could be waiting days, weeks or even months for Google to find every page on your site without assistance. If you're inexperienced with putting together a sitemap, you could hinder your efforts to get your site in front of customers.

Work with an expert capable of properly formatting this resource and submitting it to the search engines. You don't want to cut corners on this important process.
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