No! You Don’t Need to Submit Your Website to Rank
Years ago, there was a time when you submit your website to major search engines before you would they would be searchable. However, now you need to do that at all as search engines have evolved beyond the point where they need to be notified directly about a new website or inner page when it’s created.
This is why you shouldn’t let yourself be scammed by the various SEO companies that will offer to submit your website to Google or Bing in return for a fee. Companies like that are only interested in making a quick buck and it’s in their interest to perpetuate the submission myth. If you pay them to submit your website to search engines, you’re literally paying them for nothing.
As you will know by now, search engines don’t charge a fee to be included in their search results. Most popular engines will include any website in their results that doesn’t break their fairly loose guidelines, while only taking exception to sites that are manipulative or unethical.
Although there is no submission process, there is some work you have to do in order to help your website rank better and for keywords that are relevant to your business. These practices are usually referred to as on-site and off-site SEO. The keywords and how highly you rank for them comes down to search engine algorithms and their assessment of how relevant and trustworthy your website is.
You can easily find out if people can find you in search engines by doing a quick search for your homepage in Google or Bing (e.g. www.domainname.com). If your website pops up in the results that are returned, it means your website has already been found and indexed.
Even if you do absolutely nothing after launching your website, it will eventually be found and included with Google and Bing listings. However, if you would like to speed up this process or find that perhaps your website hasn’t been crawled and indexed by search engines, there are a few actions you can take towards it.
Webmaster Tools
Google and Bing both recommend that your set up webmaster accounts with them for your website. This allows you to communicate problems to them or find recommendations of how to improve your website’s rankings. It is then beneficial for you to set up accounts with them at some point, but you’ll have a head start if you do it as soon as your website is launched essentially “submitting” it to them. The options within both Webmaster Tools may seem complicated and confusing but you don’t need to concern yourself with them for the most part if you don’t want to. Just setting up accounts and linking them to your website is enough to instantly get yourself in search results.
Backlinks
If you’ve done any research into SEO, you’ll have undoubtedly heard that links back to your website play a big role in helping your website climb the ranks. This is especially true if the link comes from a website that is well established and updated regularly. Just a single backlink will be enough to help search engines index your website and creating a few will help you incredibly. One of the best and quickest ways to do that is leaving a comment on a newly published article on a reasonably popular blog since most blogs allow you to leave you to leave a link to your website when commenting.
Google+
One of the main reasons for creating a Google+ page for your business is that it builds trust with Google, but there are other benefits too. You can link your Google+ page to your own website, meaning it will be instantly crawled and indexed by Google. Additionally, if you have a personal Google+ page, you can access the + section and share your website’s URL. If you were savvy enough to add social media buttons to your website, you can hit the +1 button and instantly submit your website for indexing in Google.
