How to Submit Your Website to Major Search Engines and Directories

Most search engines automatically search the entire web looking for new websites and web pages to add to their index. This is called "crawling the web" and may be carried out every few hours, days, weeks or months. Timing depends on the site being crawled; some sites are crawled more often than others. However, there are a few situations in which you would do well to submit your website to be indexed by a search engine. These include:

- If you use a subdomain website (especially one of those free ones), it would be better if you asked for it to be indexed. Large search engines like Google are reluctant to crawl and index subdomain websites for reasons that are not clear.

- You have added new content since your website was last crawled.

- You have important information that you want to appear in search engine results immediately.

- Your website is brand new.

How to Add Your Site to Google

- Go to the "Add Your URL to Google" page at: http://www.google.com/addurl/

- In the box provided, enter your full web address with the "http://" prefix included. Enter only the main/landing page of your website. Do not submit every page of your website.

- Follow the rest of the instructions.

How to Add Your Site to Bing

- Go to the URL Submission page at the Bing Webmaster Center found at http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

- Follow the instructions on the page. Enter your URL with the "http://" prefix in the box provided.

How to Add Your Site to Yahoo! Search

- Go to the site submission page on Yahoo! Site Explorer at: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

- Enter the address of your website or the webpage with the "http://" prefix included.

- You must have a Yahoo! account to make use of this service.

How to Add Your Site to Ask.com and Teoma

Ask.com is also known as Ask Jeeves in the United Kingdom.

- This submission process requires technical know-how.

- Create a sitemap for your website

- Go to the Ask.com Webmaster FAQ at http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml. Questions No. 18 and No. 22 deal specifically with creating and submitting the sitemap. Read the entire FAQ to ensure that you do not miss any important information.

How to Add Your Site to AOL Search

AOL Search results are derived from both Google and the Open Directory Project (ODP) which is also known as DMOZ (www.dmoz.org). Submitting your site to the ODP entails the following:

Submitting Your Website to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

- Go to the ODP home page at www.dmoz.org and choose a category that best describes your website. These categories are further subdivided into more specific categories.

- Look for the "suggest URL" link at the top of the page. Not all categories have this link and if you cannot find one in the category you have chosen, you may have to choose a more specific category.

- When you find a suitable category that has the "suggest URL" link, click on the link. You will be directed to a page where you can submit your URL. Follow the instructions carefully.

- Enter the URL of your website with the "http://" prefix included.

- Your site may not be accepted into directory and this is usually stated on the submission page.

How to Add Your Site to Netscape Search

Netscape Search is powered by AOL Search and Google. Following the instructions for submitting to AOL Search and Google will cover for Netscape.

How to Add Your Site to AlltheWeb.com and AltaVista

Search results on AlltheWeb.com and AltaVista are provided by Yahoo! Submitting your website to Yahoo! means your site will be returned in their search results.

There are few things you should take note of:

- Do not be impatient and resubmit your URL over and over. This will only add your submission to the end of the queue each time making it take longer to index.

- Create sitemaps to tell the search engine crawler which pages to crawl and which ones not to.

- Submitting your site is not a guarantee that it will be indexed.

- Submit your site to the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). Major search engines including Google, Yahoo! Search, AOL Search, etc. derive some of their search results from its directory.

- Your site will be crawled faster and more often if it has a lot of incoming links.