The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Submission Websites

by

What is Search Engine Submission?

As the name suggests, the process of submitting a website’s URL to a search engine is called search engine submission. But the entire process is not that simple. In this guide, we are going to explore the depths of search engine submission and how websites can benefit from this process. 

Conventionally, webmasters all over the world use SEO methods for optimizing their website in order to capture a large percentage of their audience and rank higher on SERPs. But sometimes, even the best SEO practices fail to help webmasters achieve better results. That’s when search engine submissions can help them get more visitors and rank higher, for establishing their website authority. 

Before we go into any further detail, let’s give you a quick overview of search engines and study how do they work. 

Table of Contents

Search Engines: What are they?

Search engines enable users to search the internet for content through keywords. It is true that even though there are numerous search engines available for users, only a few dominate the global market. Whenever someone inserts certain keywords to find their desired information online, the search engine offers results in the form a search engine results page or SERP. But do you ever think how the search engine ranks your website?

There are several factors that come into play for search engines to rank your website. One of those is the algorithms they apply for evaluating a website. By algorithms, we mean the programs that search engines use to assess and rank a website. The purpose of these programs is to understand how users look for information so search engines can provide them the best answers within no time. That means, algorithms help search engines to offer the most relevant and high-quality results to users. 

How does a Search Engine Work?

Fundamentally, the working mechanism of any search engine involves three important steps. 

Crawling

A search engine employs programs to scour all the information that’s available on the internet. We refer to these programs as crawlers or bots. These bots crawl on websites every few days. That’s why a website’s content may become stale soon after you update it. 

Indexing

A search engine uses keywords for understanding and categorizing content on a webpage. When webmasters follow the best SEO practices, search engines can better understand a website and rank it more accurately. 

Ranking

Different factors like links, speed, and keyword density come into play for helping a search engine rank a website. The purpose of a search engine is to offer users high quality and relevant results. 

While many search engines offer tips and suggestions to improve page ranking, they keep their exact algorithms a secret. Furthermore, they also keep changing the algorithms so nobody can decipher or misuse them for their benefit. 

The only way to ensure that you comply with these algorithms and rank your website higher is to follow the latest and best SEO practice. For example, you can prompt search engines to crawl new content by optimizing your website content frequently and using the most appropriate keywords so it can appear for relevant searchers. 

What are Directory Search Engines?

There are some niche search engines that function as directories for certain content types. That means they don’t crawl the entire internet. Website owners and webmasters can still use SEO tactics for ranking these websites highly for relevant queries within these search engines. 

Why Using Rich Media Content is Important?

Blended or universal search is a term to represent the way search engines offer different types of content for users in the search results. Apart from the conventional text page results, the SERPs also present rich media content in the form of maps, videos, images, blogs, and shopping catalogues. 

When you create different types of content for your business or product website, the search engine will have more opportunities to crawl that content. For instance, creating a ‘demo’ or a ‘tutorial’ video can give more details about using a new product or service. When you couple this ‘video’ with a blog post, your website has more chances of appearing on SERPs and attaining a better rank. 

Using ‘structured data’ on your website can help search engines comprehend and display different types of data/content. You can add a code to the HTML markup. With structured data, all information such as images, review rating, phone number, and addresses can appear on the search engine result page. 

Google’s Updates and Algorithms

When it comes to Google, we can’t create content that can rank our website rank higher without getting familiar with the search engine’s algorithms updates. 

An algorithm comprises a mix of operations that illustrate how links get classified on search results page, organically. The function of these algorithms is to design a hierarchy of pages for offering results in the most relevant order. 

The algorithm employs a series of criteria for achieving this goal and is updated regularly for becoming more and more relevant. With the latest algorithm, Google aims to improve the classification of results as well as reduce or eliminates the position of low-quality content. 

Every year, thousands of updates take place but only a few stand out because of their impact on the SEO industry. Over the recent years, here are some of the key updates to the search engine’s algorithms. 

Major Updates and Algorithms from Google

Panda: Introduced in 2011, the update penalized webpages with low-quality content including excessive keywords and link farms. 

Penguin: The update came in 2012 and penalized websites with low-quality backlinks. It was after this update that webmasters started valuing contextualized links from authoritative websites. 

Hummingbird: The Hummingbird update arrived in 2013 for improving results classification. The update focused on the exact match between the search intention and the keyword. 

Mobilegeddon: With this 2015 update, the creation of mobile-friendly websites became a crucial ranking factor. 

Rank Brain: The update came in 2015 for adding machine learning and artificial intelligence to the algorithm for better understanding the intentions of users. The update compelled website owners to consider mobile pages as one of the top factors for ranking.

BERT: The 2013 update integrated an artificial intelligence system that specialized in natural language processing for understanding how humans search.

Now that you know what exactly are search engines and how do they work, let’s delve into the process of search engine submission.

How do you Submit a Website to Search Engines?

The process of submitting a website’s URL to search engines depends on the terms and conditions of that search engine. There are a few search engines that allow users to list a website directly, with a minimal registration. Other websites may require a full registration.

Getting indexed on renowned search engines such as Google is a great way to direct free traffic to your website. Typically, search engine submissions or SES are of two types. 

  • Manual SES
  • Automatic SES

Let’s briefly discuss these two. 

Manual SES

Manual submission involves visiting a search engine individually for submitting your URL. You will have to fill out the necessary information properly. While it’s not too much work, manual submissions are a tedious task when you need to submit a website’s URL to multiple search engines. 

Automatic SES

Like the name says, automatic submission is just the opposite of manual submission. This type of submission involves filling the form information just once. In the next phase, the software program chooses the appropriate information that the search engine requires for accepting the submission of the website’s URL.

Not too long ago, people had to pay for ‘search engine submissions.’ But today, it’s not mandatory. That’s because bots are now quite good at crawling websites. 

What are the Best Ways to Utilize Search Engine Submission Sites?

Note that the process of search engine submissions is almost the same for several search engines. But here are a few steps you can take for ensuring that you submit the website accurately to a search engine. 

Fill in All Details Accurately

When you are submitting the details on the search engine site, remember to fill all the essential details accurately. You will have to submit information such as emails, links, homepage, and keywords. 

Sign-up

Prior to submitting your website, make sure you sign-up for the website. Some search engine webmasters allow users to place direct links on its dashboard whereas others let them sign-up. 

It will help you with any required modifications in the details. You can follow the same process for directory, bookmarking, and article submissions. 

Check for Blocked Indexing

Through the Robot.txt file, you can give certain permissions to the specific spiders. For that, you must enable the indexing in the robot.txt file for allowing the search engine to crawl your website flawlessly.

Choose the Top Websites Carefully

There are some search engine websites that guarantee higher traffic to your website. When utilizing the top search engines like Bing, Google, Yandex, etc., remember to give more attention to the submission process. Hence, it is crucial that you keep updating all data of your website. 

Create a Sitemap

A sitemap communicates which file and pages you think are crucial for your website. Webmasters can use sitemaps to communicate the important pages of their website to Google as well as offer useful information about these files. For instance, the sitemap can tell search engines about the last date when the website was update and any alternate language versions. 

Once you create a sitemap, move on the to this next step.

Add the Sitemap to Google Search Console

  • Now open the Google Search Console and select Sitemaps under Index
  • Paste your sitemap URL and hit submit
  • Add it to Google Search Console

When you have multiple sitemaps, repeat the process until you list all the sitemaps under the submitted section.

To do this properly, you must add and verify your website to GSC.

You can study the Search Console Guide for more in-depth steps. This guide will walk you through each step you have to take for submitting a website to Google as well as Google News. 

Submitting an Individual Page URL to Google

Do you want to submit only one page to Google? The procedure for that is simple too.

  • Go to URL inspection in Search Console and paste the URL of the page you wish to index.
  • In case the page is not indexed, you will notice that GSC gives a message which says ‘URL is not on Google. Click on Request Indexing to get it crawled.
  • Use URL inspection to request indexing
  • If the page is indexed, you will see a message that says ‘URL is on Google’
  • When you update content and need the search engine to recrawl the page, click on ‘Request Indexing’ for indexing those changes.

How to Submit your Website to Yahoo?

That’s quite easy. If you want to submit a website to Yahoo, you must submit it to Bing. 

Yes, that’s right. When you submit your website to Bing, it automatically gets submitted to Yahoo.

How to Submit Your Website to Bing?

You must visit Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your website to Bing. Similar to Search Console, you can easily submit your sitemap to Bing. Simply select ‘Sitemaps’ from the menu and paste the URL of your sitemap. Press ‘Submit.’

Once you submit the XML sitemap in Bing Webmaster tools, it also be submitted to Yahoo. That’s because the Bing Index operates them both. 

Bing URL Submissions Plugin

When you have a WordPress website, an easy way to submit your content to Bing is through the Bing submissions plug.

The plug can be activated easily and is free for everyone. The best part is that the plugin is going to automatically submit your updated or new content to Bing’s search index once you add your API key.

How to Activate the Bing URL Submissions WordPress Plugin

There are a host of features users can find valuable. Some of these include:

  • Manual URL submission
  • Automatic submission feature that you can switch on/off, according to your requirements
  • View recent URLs which are submitted through the plugin. Users can also download the list for keeping track of submissions
  • Re-submitting recent URLs

How to Submit your Website to DuckDuckGo?

You don’t have to. Yes, that’s the answer to this question. This search engine automatically indexes the web. Hence, there is no need to submit your website manually. DuckDuckGo employs over 400 sources and Bing’s search results. When you successfully follow all the previous steps, we mentioned to submit your website to Yahoo and Bing, you don’t have to index your site on DuckDuckGo.

Additional Resources for Search Engine Submission

Numerous search engines follow certain processes for website submission. Here are some useful links that can help you during website submission to search engines. 

Here are links to the official pages for submitting your site to:

Submit to Google News

Submit site to Bing Webmaster Tools

Submit Google Webmaster Tools

Submit my site to Yandex

Can you Check if Your Website is Indexed or not?

Yes, you can easily check if your website is indexed. Simply type in the URL of your website in the Google search box. The result will show up if Google knows about your website. In case the website doesn’t show up as the number one result, you will have to submit it to the search engine. 

Why does the Search Engine Fail to Find your Website?

Popular search engines like Google need to find your website before crawling, indexing, and rating it. Only then, it can rank or display the website in its listings. Google bots can access and crawl your website only if it understands that your website exists.

That means, your website can be listed if it is crawled and indexed by Googlebot in the first place.

When you perform a website search in Google, it will only display results from the domain you enter. Users can use the site search operator on the internal pages of the website or the homepage.

What are the Benefits of Using Search Engine Submission Websites?

There are numerous benefits you can reap when you submit a website to submission websites. Here we list just some of the many benefits you can accomplish through search engine submission. 

Higher Traffic

Search engine submission websites with high PR have millions of users who can help you generate a significant amount of traffic.

More Awareness and Exposure

URL submission websites will promote your brand and business online. When more users will get to know about your services and products, you will enjoy more brand awareness and exposure. 

When you want to build relevant and valuable do-follow backlinks, submission sites can be excellent resources. Since these backlinks function like votes, they can help your website rank higher on SERPs. Hence, the more submissions you make, the better for your website ranking. 

Free Advertising

Many new businesses don’t have the budget to spend on paid promotion. Since, free search engine submissions play a crucial role in advertising services and products for free, they can be an added advantage for any new business. 

Increased Conversions

When more people know about the products and services of a brand, it will naturally result in more conversions. Hence, there will be a consistent increase in the overall profits.

How to Register Successfully on Free Search Engine Submission Websites

Remember to take care of the following steps when registering your website to search engine submission sites. 

  • Pick credible and authentic websites from a reliable list of free search engine websites.
  • Pick a single website at a time to create an account on it.
  • After creating an account, submit your blog or website URL to the website.
  • Follow the same process for the remaining search engine submission sites in the list. 

We are also providing a comprehensive list of free URL submission websites. The best part is that all of these websites are free, and you won’t have to pay anything for submitting your blog or website to these search engine submission websites. 

Remember that search engines like google will find your website eventually, even when you don’t submit it manually. But we recommend submitting the sitemap of your website to these search engines because it can make a huge difference. A sitemap does a great job at providing additional information your website and the search engine returns this favor by indexing your website. 

Furthermore, when you submit a website to search engines, you signal them about recent content updates. The new crawling process speeds up the ranking process for newly added keywords which replace old and irrelevant keywords.

List of Free Top Search Engine Submission Sites

The search engine websites we are listing can help any blog or website to rank higher. But another important step is to create quality content and choose the right keywords for getting appropriate backlinks. Never assume that submitting a blog or business website to search engine submission sites will automatically rank your website higher.

We are recommending these search engine submission sites because they receive high traffic and have high Domain authority. Not only these search engine submission websites will give you more traffic but will add more authority to your business website, e-commerce store, or business website in your niche.

  1. International Business Listing Sites
  2. Forum Submission Sites
  3. RSS Feed Submission Sites
  4. Profile Creation Sites List
  5. Coupon Submission Sites List

Tips to Follow when Submitting your website to Search Engines

Let us remind you again that free search engine submissions only work when you can create good content and use keywords effectively. When you are not confident about the quality of your website, it is better to let professionals increase your website’s rankings through optimized content. 

Another way to evaluate whether your website content is of good quality is to check if it features a mix of useful articles, helpful guides, tutorials, or videos? If you believe in creating content for robots and not humans, then your website content may look nothing but a word bank of keywords. 

Latest research findings reveal that Google prefers longer-form content that can completely fulfill a user’s intent. So instead of creating content that revolves around only popular search queries and keywords, create content that is more like a guide or an information hub. 

In simple words, don’t worry too much about keywords and start focusing on how to provide the best user experience to your audience. 

Again, the question arises whether you should submit your website manually to search engines or automatically. While we understand that the automatic submission method works great when you must submit multiple websites, if you have only one website to take care of, here are some reasons why you should opt for the manual method. 

Manual Search Engine Submission

Don’t consider it as the only way to submit your website to a search engine. But here are some benefits for your consideration. 

Peace of mind

It’s better to be safe than sorry, when it comes to implementing the right search engine optimization techniques. Although manual submissions will require extra work and patience, the results are totally worth it. Web directories usually have numerous categories. Choosing the manual submission method reduces the chances of making any mistakes so you can have complete peace of mind. 

Communicate Important Information about your Website

Manual submission allows you to communicate important information about your website such as changes and content updates, to search engines. 

A Convenient Improvement Opportunity

When you submit your website manually, you get easy access to several tools for improving your website. Moreover, users can inform the search engines that the content is now updated, and it needs to be crawled again. 

In addition to manual website submissions, here are a few things that you must consider when submitting your website to search engines. 

User Experience

There are many SEO benefits for offering the best possible user experience to visitors. Keep your website easily searchable and navigable for guaranteeing the best user experience. Make sure your website has related content with relevant internal linking. That’s everything that retains visitors on your page. 

Site Speed

The speed at which your webpages load is a major differentiator for most search engines. Hence, it is important for webmasters to ensure that their website loads at faster rates. 

Cross-device Compatibility

Another factor to remember is that your website and its content must be equally optimized for every screen and device. According to Google, responsive design is the most preferred mode of mobile optimization.

Internal linking

Most of us are already aware about the many benefits of an easy to navigate website. However, today’s content creators and editors emphasize on the importance of internal linking to attract traffic. 

Benefits of Internal Linking

Let’s explore some of the many benefits of internal linking. 

One of the most important benefits of internal linking is that it offers audience with more reading material. The key to retain visitors is to use clear and relevant anchor text. If you don’t know what anchor text means, it refers to the clickable highlighted words in a link. Internal links successfully reduce a website’s bounce rates because users can find tons of information on a single platform. 

Internal links also improve rankings for some keywords. For example, if we wish to rank an article for ‘web development’ then we will link it to other aspects of web development such as the ‘latest web development tools’ or ‘web development practices’ using variations of similar anchor text. 

That will allow search engines or Google to know that the post is relevant to users who are searching for everything about web development. Remember to be creative with your anchor text because multiple identical uses can look suspicious.

All such links help Google index your website as Googlebots fetch new information while crawling on the internal links of your website. 

More Authority

By authority of a website, we mean the trust that users or visitors have in your web presence. Regardless of the niche or industry you operate in, your online audience has just one medium to get a glimpse of your business: your website. 

Conventionally, any links from authority websites are very valuable. A website will have more authority if it has more links from high authority websites. 

Interestingly, correlations between rankings and backlinks are decreasing over the years. Hence, the importance of ‘links’ may not be the same as before. Nonetheless, internal links are currently play a crucial role in the success of your website. 

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Although, meta descriptions don’t have a major impact on improving the SERP rankings, they are definitely used before publishing any webpage. They work because they can provide a glimpse of what the page has to offer for motivating more searchers to click on the results. 

Don’t underestimate the role of this short paragraph that appears under the URL of a page in the SERPs. A good meta description is under 156 characters which clearly defines what visitors should expect from the webpage.

Apart from meta descriptions, there is another thing that you should be aware of, title tags. These tags are valuable for informing visitors and search engines about a webpage in a concise manner. Search engine results will highlight the keywords in your title tags when a searcher uses those keywords in their query. 

Create unique title tags inside the <head> area of the website’s HTML:

<head>

<title>Example Title</title>

</head>

Use some accurate keywords that describe the webpage and your brand name. But make sure to use only relevant keywords. Another crucial thing to remember is that you may format content for search engines, but you are always writing for humans. Learning more about how title tags work can help you write these tags precisely. 

Schema Markup

When you add schema markup to your webpage’s HTML, you can successfully make your search results more appealing. Consequently, your search results can transform into a rich media playground with customer ratings, star-ratings, images, etc.  

The primary purpose of schema markup is to facilitate search engines so they can understand your website content better. Since Google and other renowned search engines prefer this method of markup, don’t forget to use this markup method for increasing your clickthrough rates. The structure connects the dots about you, your services/products, and everyone involved with your business. 

Tagged Images

Most of us forget to include the alt attribute when adding images to our content. However, that’s a mistake that can lead to major losses, in terms of SEO. What we fail to realize is that search engines such as Google can’t ‘see’ images. What they can do is ‘read’ the alt text.

By describing images accurately in the alt text field, we can boost the chances of our images appearing in the ‘Image search’ option of Google. Alt text also comes in handy for improving the accessibility of a website when people use the ‘screen reader’ software.

Creating Timeless content

Sometimes, grabbing ‘quick win’ stories to create fresh content works for driving instant traffic. But nothing works like timeless or evergreen content to guarantee a consistent flow of users.

Don’t forget to add practical advice, tips, and helpful guides to your website’s content. This type of content can help your website occupy higher rankings and improve long-term traffic.

Appropriate Domain Names

Using sub-directory root domains is always a better idea instead of choosing sub-domains. It’s better to avoid hyphens and alternative top-level domain names because the search engine can consider them spammy.

When you have a domain name that is rich in keywords, your website can fall under scrutiny from Google. The search engine giant de-prioritized websites having keyword-rich domains. While you can still have a keyword in your domain, it can lead to more scrutiny and negative ranking from search engines. 

Remember that whenever you are running a website without the www. prefix, anyone who types the domain name will still be redirected to your website. When that doesn’t happen, Google assumes that there are two different websites, thereby compromising your visibility. 

All headlines for website articles must fall under 55 characters to guarantee that they are visible in SERPs. Make sure you create descriptive, attractive, and catchy headlines. Never choose clickbait headlines because they are a recipe for disaster. 

The URL or permalink that we can alter in our CMS even after it’s been set automatically, doesn’t have to match the headline. According to Google, users can use three to four key words, but the key is to put the most important keyword first.

Comments

Never turn off your comments. Building a thriving community of regular commenters who engage in a dialogue under your posts posts leaves a good impression of your website. The only thing to be mindful of is spammy comments or content. Adding no follow value to the comments section is also a good idea so the search engine can overlook any erroneous errors that may appear. 

Local SEO

Over the years, Google has worked on its search features for giving users the best answers to their queries, according to their location. That’s specifically important to businesses in the real world that intend to capture a searcher’s attention at the right time. For example, while searching for a place to eat as they walk down the street.

Registering to Google My Business always works to streamline all important information and provide users easy access to your business. The listing can feature important information such as custom reviews, contact information, opening times, and customer reviews, etc. 

Social Media Marketing

One of the most obvious ways that you can raise a website’s visibility (other than SEO) is through social media. Make sure you are present on all major social media platforms. Hence, your website must contain all the relevant links to your social media profiles. 

Bottom Line

Today’s web developers use search engine submissions for outperforming rivals and boosting website traffic. 

We hope that this guide helped you acknowledge the importance of search engine submission websites. You also learnt how to ensure that your website is ready to be crawled and indexed by search engines. The search engine submission websites we listed in this post are high DA websites which can help you rank higher on SERPs. Again, using the manual submission method can be more beneficial because you there will be fewer chances of making mistakes during the submission process. 

Feel free to add any more submission website to this list. Don’t forget to find out more about how to boost the rankings of your website through SEO and non-SEO practices. Cadslist offers tons of advice to give your blog, e-commerce store, or business website more exposure. Don’t forget to check out more of our blog posts and search engine submission directories.