How To Submit To Search Engines

It is vital that you let the search engines know your website exists. Because if they don't know your website exists, you have no hope of getting indexed by them.

There are two ways to get your site onto the search engine radar:

  1. Submit your webpages directly.
  2. Let the search engines find your webpages via links from webpages already crawled and indexed by the search engines. Nowadays this is the preferred method. The reason is because more and more search engines, such as Google, no longer rely on site owners to submit their websites for indexing. Instead they rely on finding sites via links from other websites already in its index.

The most basic way of submitting to a search engine is visit a search engine's 'submissions page' (add a site, submit URL, submit a site, etc.) and submit your website's URL.

The search engine 'should' add your site to its list of URLs to crawl. However, this doesn't always happen and you will usually find some statement stating this on a search engine's submission page.

Part of the reason is because far too many webmasters abuse the system by submitting their websites over and over again. So don't rely on search engines indexing your site just because you submitted it via their submission form.

I highly recommend getting links from websites already indexed in the major search engines. Visit the 'How To Increase Your Site's Link Popularity For Higher Search Engine Rankings' section for more information.

How To Compose Search Engine Listing Titles & Descriptions

To ensure that your entire website is indexed properly by the search engines, you must prepare your website before submitting it.

To do that you must make sure each page has:

  • a useful listing title.
  • a useful listing description.

How To Compose Search Engine Listing Titles

You must include a HTML TITLE tag in the HEAD section of every single page. All search engines extract the contents of a page's TITLE tag to use as the listing title. Without a title tag search engines will either use something like "Untitled," or the page URL as the listing title. This is detrimental to your page's search engine relevancy and doesn't help to sell your webpage to search engine users.

Here's an example of a TITLE tag:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Strategies</TITLE>
</HEAD>

How To Compose Search Engine Listing Descriptions

Quite a few search engines now extract the contents of the meta description tag to use as the listing description. If the meta description tag is missing, the first sentence of the main body text is used instead.

Here's an example of a meta description tag:

<HEAD>
<META NAME='description' CONTENT='FREE search engine optimization strategies, newsletters, news, tips, statistics, & resources.'>
</HEAD>

Common Problem With Indexing The First Sentence

If the meta description tag is missing, search engines will extract the first sentence of the main body text to use as the listing description. This sounds good in theory, but quite often doesn't produce the desired results.

The reason is most webpages display a navigation menu at the top or left side of a webpage. As such navigation links come before the main body text in the HTML document. So the first couple of hundred characters that search engine spiders see are the navigation links. This is what they extract to use as the listing description.

This is not good. But what's worse is that if a website uses a top or left navigation bar, it is most likely to use it on every page of a site. So every listing description will end up with the same keywords.

Visit the 'How To Compose Web Directory Listing Titles & Descriptions' section for more information on how to compose your page title and description for optimum rankings.

How To Manually Submit Your Website To Search Engines

The best way to submit a website to search engines for indexing is by hand. Yes, I do mean physically visiting a search engine and registering your URLs.

Of course you should only submit a site by hand if you only have one or two small websites to submit. If you have dozens of webpages, I recommend using a search engine submission software program or online service.

Some search engines have a policy of only accepted a limited number of URLs per day. So you would have to return on another day to submit additional URLs.

In addition, most search engine spiders only crawl a limited number of pages in a site. So if you have a large site with hundreds of webpages you should register every important page of your site, which may require many visits.