We highly recommend manually submitting your website pages to the search engines. That said, the search engines give no guarantee of ranking your page because you have manually submitted it.  It is a tool that we use to let the search engines know that we have new information to share.

We suggest manual submission of your site’s pages to Google, Yahoo! and Bing because they have made it apparent that it is what they prefer. The search engines have implemented manual submission as a best practice to protect themselves from extreme levels of spam.

It is important to submit your site’s pages to all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) because even though the other engines have less traffic than Google, they still have millions of users. When you submit a URL or domain name to the search engines, it could take anywhere from two to four weeks to get indexed. Sometimes your page will not get indexed after you submit it, if that occurs, wait four weeks and then resubmit the page again.

If you are unhappy with your web page’s ranking results, take a look at what your competition is doing.  Make sure you are following the basic rules of search engine optimization.  Make changes to the page and resubmit it to the search engines. You can submit your pages a maximum of two times per month until you are listed in the major search engines’ results.

Submit Site to Google

Google’s URL submit is very quick and easy. Just go to Google’s web page for URL submitting, type in your URL, type in the message that ensures Google you are an individual not a software robot and click “add URL.”

You can also submit your site map to Google via their Webmaster Tools.

Submit Site to Yahoo!

Since 2010, Yahoo search has been powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. When you submit your site to Bing you will also show up in Yahoo’s search results. See below on how to submit your site to Bing.  Yahoo! had a paid submission process in the past, although Yahoo! Directory is no longer available.

Submit Site to Bing

Bing allows you to submit your URL, just like Google.  You will first need to have a Bing login, then go to Bing’s Webmaster Tools page. Once logged in simply type in the URL of your homepage and press “submit”. You will also want to have the URL for the .xml version of your sitemap readily available, as it will ask for this in the first step of submitting your domain. After submitting you will have to verify ownership of the domain. This can be a little tricky if you are not savvy with HTML, as you will need to add a small snippet of code to the header of your site in order to pass this verification process. Once verified, you are finished!

Submit Site to Ask

Ask no longer allows you to submit your sitemap. This was a feature they disabled, and now solely crawl sites.

At Smart Solutions, we add all of our clients’ sitemaps to the auto-discovery directive, robots.txt.  This ensures that all of the search engines automatically know about your sitemap.  It does not hurt to manually submit your sitemaps, for the search engines that allow it.