Did you know you should be registering your website with search engines? Ten to fifteen years ago we used to “submit” a website to search engines, and there even used to be search engine submission software that you could buy for that. That was back when there were also dozens of search engines.
In the modern world there are only 3 major search engines anybody cares about: Bing, Yahoo!, and Google.
Many (if not most) non-technical website owners have no idea that you should actually register a website with search engines (or why).
Why You Should Register Your Website with Search Engines
Each of the “big 3″ search engines has a “webmaster control panel” that you can use for all websites you own:
Yahoo Site Explorer
Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Central
Since Yahoo! has been acquired by Microsoft, that search engine actually has search results that come from Bing – but even so Yahoo (still) has it’s own webmaster tools. Nobody is exactly sure how good they work, or how much longer they’ll be available – but we still (currently) use them.
With WordPress websites normally you would install a plugin that generated a XML Sitemap. This is different than the standard complete list of links sitemap you would see on a front end of a website. An XML sitemap isn’t a webpage at all, it’s a special file for search engine crawlers that’s used to indicate which files you want indexed and how often they’re updated. For non-WordPress websites there are also several online XML sitemap generators you can use.
Once you generate an XML sitemap, you then login to your webmaster tools at the 3 big search engines and “submit” it to them for indexing. You also have to verify that you actually own the website (with a meta tag or downloadable file). Once you do that the webmaster control panels can tell you if and when it’s been indexed, and Google has extensive reporting options on how your website gets indexed (and errors and issues).
About the Author
JTPratt Media is a Michigan based SEO company that works with small businesses and corporations to improve online authority and rankings for increased website ROI.