Organic search engine traffic can often provide over 50% of your traffic for free if you have a well-optimized plan and strategy. You will have to earn your respect from Google. Your website will not be show up high in the rankings day one, but as you earn authority with Google you can build your search engine rankings, thus gaining more traffic. In 2017, search engines drove 34.8 percent of site visits in 2017 compared to social networks which accounted for 25.6 percent of referral traffic. You do the math.
So from day one, I recommend you optimize your website or blog for search engines. Meaning, as soon as you established a domain, submit your website to be crawled by Google and Bing. It's optional to submit a site manually because
Note: Search engine spiders discover most web pages automatically by following links. So even if you do not submit your site to Google and Bing directly, the search engines will most likely find it.
Learn How To Get Your Site Indexed by:
- Google (Most Important)
- Bing (formerly Yahoo)
was the top overall traffic referrer for the year and owned a 36.82 percent share of visits during the second half of 2017 according to searchengineland.com.
How-To Add Your Website to Google Search Engines
You must have a Google account to begin. You can either use one you already have or create a new account (preferred).
Once your account is set up, go to Google Search Console or GSC (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) and sign into the Google account you created or already have. You will then be prompted to add a property. This is where you enter your web address. Be sure to enter the https or http accordingly and add all versions of your site (i.e www.yourbrand.com, yourbrand.com).
Next, you will have to verify ownership of your domain. If you purchased a domain from Google, you can instantly verify ownership (if using the same email for both GSC and and Google Domains).
If not, you will be prompted to verify you own your site. There will be options to choose from to verify, with the best option being the HTML tag. Highlight the entire tag, open a new tab and paste into the HTML of your website after the <head> tag.
Once completed, switch back to Google Webmaster Tools and click "Verify".
Creating and Adding a Sitemap
Adding a sitemap may sound tough if you have never heard of it before, but we promise it is very easy and critical to getting your site indexed.
Visit our favorite XML-SITEMAP Generator to create your sitemap
Enter in the full web address you would like to create a map for and select "Start".
That's it. Once completed, navigate to the Google Search Console and add your sitemap in two simple steps.
- Select Sitemaps from the Left Sidebar
- Enter in: sitemap.xml
In addition, you can ask Google to manually crawl your site as well a different route and get indexed even faster using the old version of GSC, called "Fetch as Google". To complete this process, follow the next six steps:
- From the GSC Dashboard, choose "Go to Old Version" (which I prefer better than the new version).
- On this version, Select Fetch as Google from the Crawl menu in the left sidebar.
- Type the URL of the web page you want Google to crawl (or leave blank to crawl the home page).
- With Web selected in the drop-down, click Fetch.
- When you see the status Success, click Submit to Index.
- Choose to submit either the single URL or the URL plus all pages linked from it, and click OK.
How to Check if Your Site is Indexed
We suggest you wait at least a week, to see if your site has been indexed. Usually, when you use a third-party site to host your store or site (i.e. Shopify, Wordpress) or blog, it will be indexed rather quickly.
Want to check if your site is listed in Google? Type this in the Google search box:
Link:Sitename.com
or frequently check the Google Search Console for impressions, reach, etc.
This is what will show up on the All (web) pages and Images tab if you are indexed by Google:
After submitting your site Google, you can submit your site to several other sites. For the quickest race to rankings, we suggest you also submit your site through:
- Bing Webmaster Tools (covers both Bing and Yahoo search engines)
HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE TO BING
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and Yahoo are less frequently searched than powerhouse search engine Google. However, adding your niche website to their search engine is a way to increase traffic as well. Less frequent doesn't mean not at all, so it is totally worth submitting there also.
When you submit your site to Bing, you also submit the site to Yahoo automatically.
If you already have a Bing Webmaster Tools account set up, you can use its Submit URLs feature in the Configure My Site section to submit your site.
If not, follow the next five steps:
- Visit Bing Webmaster Tools
- Sign up with your preferred email account (Use the same Google account from earlier to keep everything in the same spot)
- Once saved, Select Add Site and enter personal information requested from Bing (only have to do this once)
- Type in the URL of your website’s home page or the specific page you want to be crawled.
- Enter the CAPTCHA text you see displayed, and then click Submit.
