Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

Getting your website listed in major search engines

Sticky Note Search Engines
If you have a website on-line you'll want to have it listed in search engines. Although most automatically find new websites, there are tools and techniques available that allow you to better see how your site is listing and improvements you can make for better ranking.

See Also…
Written by Erich and published 2:09 PM - May 24, 2022
Updates: Links and info accuracy checked.

The BIG Three... uh Four
The main search engines you'll want to get your site listed at are Google, Bing and Yahoo!, plus DuckDuckGo with about 2.4% of the market share. All other minor search engines harvest your link from this bunch once you're listed. Take a gander at our fancy schmancy pie chart here!


Global Seaarch Rankings


Submission: Search Engine Tools
Setup a tools account at the following websites to submit your website and sitemap.xml file to have all your webpages listed. See also sitemaps below on this page.

Search engines use a tools account to be included in their respective search engines. It can take up to two weeks to be listed at Google. Other search engines can take anywhere from a few days to upwards of 3 months.

Google Tools
MSN Bing & Yahoo Webmaster Tools

Get your website on Google
Google Verification & Analytics

DuckDuckGo does not require website submission. They discover and index websites from over four hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (their web crawler), Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and other partners. To be listed submit your website to Bing.

AOL search as well as most other minor search engines index websites using Google, Bing and Yahoo! listings.


Advanced: Sitemaps and robots.txt Files
Using a sitemap.xml on your website is the best SE submission technique. It is highly recommended that you add a sitemap XML file to your website so search engines can better find all your website pages. Once you create the sitemap.xml file you will want to submit your site map through the following websites:

Submit sitemap through Google Tools
Submit sitemap through MSN Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing and Yahoo!)

XML-Sitemaps Sitemap Generator
Click here to view more sitemap XML help

What Allwebco uses: We have been using the xml-sitemaps.com ($19.00) "Unlimited Sitemap Generator" on our website for many years and have had no problems of any kind. You can optionally generate sitemaps for small websites for free on their website as well.

robots.txt
Optionally you may want to create and upload a robots.txt, then add the location of your sitemap to your robots.txt. Here is a sample robots.txt. Use caution when creating or editing a robots.txt file. It tells search engines how to list your website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Sitemap: https://www.your-web-domain.com/sitemap.xml


You can use Notepad to create this file and upload it to the root folder in your hosting area where your index.html is located. Replace "your-web-domain.com" with your domain in the above example and upload a sitemap.xml to your hosting area. The "Disallow: /cgi-bin/" line keeps search engines out of the "cgi-bin" folder. See also:

More robots.txt help at Bing webmaster tools
See robots.txt at Wikipedia


Search Engine Listing Services
If you search at Google there are many services available that submit your website for you. If you have Allwebco hosting we do provide a free service to submit your website to all major search engines. contact hosting for more info. In addition to submitting your website to search engines, consider also optimizing your webpages.


Top Pay Per Click Websites
For guaranteed top listings check out the following pay-per-click programs:

Google AdWords
Microsoft Bing Ads
Yahoo! Advertising (Microsoft)
LookSmart Ad Network
LinkedIn Advertising





Related Topics:
Optimizing your pages for search engines
Editing your title and meta tags