More than 93% of web searches go through the top two search engines. (Of course, this statistic doesn’t include “search” on social media and video sites.) The fact is: everyone goes online, but where they go online is not consistent. For this reason, it’s important to make sure that you have a presence on all of the major sites.
You may think you’re already listed, but it’s worth double checking. In order to check yourself out, start with Google, which accounts for about 66% of the web’s search traffic. All you need to do is type in “site:YourURL.com” (with no spaces) and take a look at the returned results.
If you’re not there, it’s time to take the next step, which is…
Make sure you submit your site to:
1. Google (direct link to "Add Your URL" page on Google)
2. Bing (direct link to "Submit Your Site" page on Bing)
This isn’t a difficult or time consuming process; it’s as easy as typing in your full URL (a.k.a. your website address—www.yoursite.com). Luckily, there’s no need to submit multiple pages of your site. The search engines will crawl all of those once it knows of the main page.
You can also use one of the “catch-all” services to submit to several sites at once. Some popular ones are:
3. Get Listed (link to homepage of GetListed)
4. Submit Express (direct link to "Free Website Submission" page of SubmitExpress)
Beyond the top two, there are hundreds of alternate search engines (that pop up and change all the time). The good news is that it’s free to submit to most of those sites. The benefit is that you’ll appear in as many places on the web as possible, thus increasing traffic to your site. The downside is that it can take a considerable amount of time to submit to multiple search engines.
If you’re so inclined, here are a few to get you started, but there are countless others:
5. whatUseek (direct link to "Submit A Site" page of whatUseek)
6. ExactSeek (direct link to "Free Account Signup" page of ExactSeek)
7. Jayde (direct link to "Add Your Site" page of Jayde)
8. Scrub The Web (direct link to "Easy Submit" page of ScrubTheWeb)
9. Alexa (direct link to "Claim Your Site" page of Alexa)
NOTE: Website addresses change constantly. As such, if any of these links become inactive, simply do a Google search for “add URL to [search engine name]”. Don’t assume that the first returned result you get is the correct one! There may be several paid results before the link you actually need. Make sure that the link you choose goes directly to the proper search engine, as opposed to a third-party site.
