How To Submit Your Blog To Search Engines (A Beginner’s Guide)

I’m sure you love traffic from search engines. Ranking on the first page of Google is something that every blogger wants.

But what about other search engines?

Yes, Google is the biggest search engine but there are competitors like Bing and Yahoo. If we go further, there are even smaller search engines like Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, WolframAlpha etc.

Only a small percentage of Internet users use these search engines. But here’s the punchline:

Ranking your website on these search engines is comparatively easy because of the low competition. While people ignore smaller search engines, you can take advantage of it and submit your website all the search engines out there.

And, that’s what this post is all about. In this post, I’ll show you how to submit your blog to search engines.

You may have already submitted your site to Google and Bing, but we’ll still cover it in this post.

Most importantly, this article will show you how to submit to smaller search engines which don’t provide a direct method of submitting your website.

So, let’s get started.

How To Check If Your Blog Is Indexed Or Not

Before we begin, it’s important for you to know whether your blog is indexed by the search engine or not.

This will help you find out where your blog is indexed and where you need to submit your blog.

To check if your blog is indexed or not, search “site:yourdomain.com” on the search engine. The ‘site:’ operator is very common and shows search results from that specific domain.

If your domain is indexed, the search will show you the results of your blog. But, if your blog is not indexed, you will see zero results on the search engine.

Here’s how you can check if your blog is indexed on Google:

As you can see from the above image, the search has showed the results of the website I searched for. This means that the blog is indexed on Google.

The same goes for Bing:

And Yahoo:

So, that’s how you can check if your blog is indexed by search engines or not. Let’s now see how to submit your blog to Google.

How To Submit Your Blog To Google

The way Google indexes websites is by crawling your website. This job is done by the Google bot. Sometimes your website can get indexed automatically without doing anything. But, the process takes time.

The proper way to submit your website to Google is to submit a site to Google Webmaster Tools.

Now, before you get confused, let me take a step back and first explain what a sitemap is.

What Is A Sitemap?

A sitemap is basically an XML file of the URLs of your website/blog. This file helps Google or search engines, in general, to crawl your website URLs and index them.

So, how to create a sitemap? If your blog is on WordPress, you can easily create a sitemap using a WordPress Plugin.

One such plugin that can help you create a sitemap is Google XML Sitemaps. But, if you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, you don’t have to do anything. Yoast SEO automatically generates a sitemap once you’ve activated the plugin.

Just to make sure Yoast SEO has enabled the sitemap, go to WordPress Dashboard > SEO > General and click on ‘Features’ tab and check ‘XML sitemaps’ is no or off.

If it’s on, you can access your sitemap by entering the following URL –

https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

If you have Yoast SEO installed, I recommend this method over installing another plugin to your website.

Creating a sitemap is half of the battle. Now you need to verify the ownership of the website.

Head over to Google Search Console and sign in with your Google account. Once you’re inside, you’ll see a welcome page like this:

Here, enter the URL of your website to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools.

The next step is to verify the ownership of the website you just added. There are many methods. If you are in WordPress, click on ‘Alternate methods’.

You can easily verify your ownership by using ‘HTML tag’. Just select ‘HTML tag’ and copy the code.

Now go to WordPress Dashboard > SEO > General and click on ‘Webmaster Tools’ tab. Then just paste code beside ‘Google verification code’ box and click on ‘Save changes’.

And then go back to ‘Search Console’ page click on ‘Verify’.

Once your website is successfully verified, you can add a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools.

Head over to the sitemaps tab and enter the URL of your sitemap. Once your sitemap is submitted, you’re done. Your website pages will be indexed soon.

So, that’s how you submit your blog to Google. Let’s see how you can do the same in Bing & Yahoo.

How To Submit Your Blog To Bing & Yahoo

The process to submit your blog to Bing and Yahoo is the same. You have to submit your sitemap to the Bing Webmaster Tools.

Since I already showed you how to create a sitemap, I’ll not be going through it again.

Head over to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in to get started. Once you’re signed in, enter the URL of your blog to add your site.

You’ll be redirected to a page where you have to enter the URL of your sitemap.

The next step is to verify the ownership of your website. There are three ways you can do this:

• Method 1: Place an XML file on your web server
• Method 2: Copy and paste a <meta> tag in your default webpage
• Method 3: Add CNAME record to DNS

You can use any of these methods to verify your website. But, if you have Yoast SEO installed, you can simply copy the meta tag and paste it in the Webmaster Tools settings in the plugin.

Once you do this, your site will be verified in Bing Webmaster Tools. Your website will then be indexed on both Bing and Yahoo search engine.

How To Submit Your Blog To Baidu

Baidu is the biggest search engine in China. Don’t believe me? Check this out:

Baidu has over 78% search engine market share in China.

That being said, it’s very beneficial to submit your blog to Baidu. Let’s see how you can do it.

To submit your website to Baidu, visit this website. It’s in Chinese so you have to use Google Translate.

Enter your website URL and click on the submit button. And, you’re done!

That’s all you need to do submit your website on Baidu.

How To Submit Your Blog To DuckDuckGo & Other Search Engines

We covered how you can submit your website to the major search engines. Now, let’s talk about small and new search engines.

Here are examples of these search engines:

• DuckDuckGo
• Yandex
• WolframAlpha
• Dogpile

The problem with these search engines is that they don’t have offer webmaster solutions or tools.

The only way to submit your website to these search engines is to use a web submission site.

What Is A Web Submission Site?

A web submission site helps you get your website indexed on search engines. All you have to do is to submit your link to on those web directories and your website will be indexed on different search engines.

But, here’s something you should know before your blog to a web directory.

There are many web directories out there. Some of them are free while others are paid. And, most of them ask you for your email address.

Later, you might get bombarded with emails from companies offering all kinds of web services. Therefore, it is important that you don’t just submit your website to any web directory you find out there.

Apart from the spam emails, some of these web submission sites can affect your SEO as links from these websites can be very toxic.

This is why I’m listing only a few web submission sites that are not spamming.

Let’s begin.

1. DIGGZA

Diggza is a web submission site where you can submit your website to many search engines. All you have to do is to enter your website URL and email address.

Note: Whenever you submit your website to a web directory, use an email address that is not active. Because you never know if your inbox will be full of spam.

You can use this directory to submit your website/blog. You can choose on which search engine you want to submit your website.

I would recommend that you don’t choose major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Baidu since you already submitted your website directly.

2. Free Web Submission

This is another web submission tool where you can submit your website to search engines. Free Web Submission also gives you the option to include your sitemap during submission.

3. AddURLfree

This web submission tool doesn’t give you the option to choose the search engines where you want to submit your website but it’s still a great a web submission.

The free submission includes many search engines except Bing and Yahoo.

Conclusion

So, that’s all about submitting your blog to search engines. It’s always important to submit your blog and make sure it’s indexed on different search engines.

Hopefully, the above tutorials will help you submit your blog to different search engines with ease.

After submitting your blog to different search engines, it will take some time for it to show up in search results.

But still, if it is taking too long (weeks or months), you can look up the webmaster guidelines and ensure if your website is not violating any rules.

If you have any questions on submitting your website to search engines, feel free to ask via comment.

Last Updated on October 8, 2018