How to Submit a Site to Google and Bing

How to Submit a Site to Google : Follow these instructions to submit a site to Google — either a single page or the content of your whole website — for index consideration.

On the Google Search Console home page, click the website you want to submit. (You need to set up Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, for your website.)
From the GSC Dashboard, choose Fetch as Google from the Crawl menu.
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.

Google Search Console. Start now. Improve your performance on Google Search. Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site's Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results. Start now.

How to Submit a Site to Bing (and Yahoo)
When you submit your site to Bing, you also submit the site to Yahoo automatically, since Bing feeds Yahoo’s web search index. Read on for how to submit a site to Bing.

If you 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 to Bing. If not, follow this procedure:

Open the Submit Your Site to Bing form.
Type in the URL of your website’s home page or the specific page you want crawled.
Enter the CAPTCHA text you see displayed, and then click Submit.

NOTE: When you bulk submit a site to Google or Bing, there is no guarantee it will be indexed. But manual submission should bring the search engine spiders to your new content faster and give you the best chance to have your web pages indexed quickly.

Now that you know how to submit your site to Google and Bing, we’ll move on to creating XML Sitemaps — an all-important and simple way to make sure the search engines can find your pages for indexing.

Why Submit a Site Manually?
It’s optional to submit a site manually, because 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.

It’s more important to make sure the spiders can find all the pages within your site once they arrive (which is why the next tutorial lessons explain creating an XML Sitemap as well as technical SEO tips to keep your site running fast). Still, there are times when manually submitting your content to a search engine can help.

Directly submitting your site to search engines is a good idea in certain cases:

Brand new site: If you are launching a new website or subdomain, submitting the URLs in bulk directly might get the new pages crawled and indexed sooner.
Updated page: If you substantially change a page, submit the URL rather than waiting for the search engine spiders’ next scheduled visit (which could take up to six weeks, depending on the site).
Incomplete indexing: If you have web pages that for some reason have never made it into the search engine index, you can submit the specific page URLs. (TIP: To see if a web page exists in the index, do an exact match search: copy a long text snippet from your page and search for it within quotation marks. If the results include your page, it’s indexed.)

Before you submit a site, it’s a good time to check on its “crawl-ability.” Use the free Check Server Page tool below to detect any redirects (a 301 is OK, but other types are not recommended) and any technical issues that may prevent your site from appearing in search results.

Creating a sitemap for your website and keeping it up-to-date are important SEO best practices. Search engines can crawl and index your website more completely if they have an XML sitemap for reference.

This necessary SEO lesson covers how to create a sitemap so you can welcome search engine spiders and help them find their way around when they visit.

What Is a Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a text file webmasters create that tells search engines like Google and Bing what a website contains.

Basically, it’s a list of all the URLs (the page addresses) that you want indexed for your site — URLs of web pages, images, videos and other content files on the site — formatted with a few XML tags.

In this lesson you learn how to set it up right so that the search engines refer to your sitemap again and again.

How Many Sitemaps Should I Create?
Every site needs at least one XML sitemap. Having an up-to-date XML sitemap is really an essential SEO best practice.

(By contrast, submitting your site manually is an optional task. You only need to do a submission occasionally, such as when you launch a new site, add a new site section, or change content and don’t want to wait for the crawlers to find it.)

Large websites may need to break their list of URLs into multiple XML sitemaps. This ensures that the number of page URLs per sitemap doesn’t exceed the limit.

How to Create an XML Sitemap
You can create a sitemap manually, but using a sitemap generator makes the job easier. There are many good third-party tools for creating XML sitemaps automatically. One is Microsoft Bing’s free server-side Bing XML Sitemap Plugin, which can automatically generate two types of XML sitemaps that can be read by any search engine:

Comprehensive sitemap, which includes all files (except any you disallow in your robots.txt file)
Recently updated sitemap, which includes URLs of changed files only (useful for your own tracking or for prioritizing the pages that search engines should crawl)

NOTE: Any search engine can read your XML sitemap files because they comply with Sitemaps.org protocol.

How to Submit Your Sitemap to Search Engines
You can submit your XML sitemap(s) to Google and Bing using the Sitemaps feature within their webmaster tools:

Google: Log in to your Google Search Console account. Under the Crawl menu, choose Sitemaps.
Bing: Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools. You can use the Sitemap widget on your Dashboard or go to the Sitemaps feature, located under the Configure My Site section.

The above methods let you proactively submit your XML sitemap file(s) to the search engines if you want to. Regardless, make sure you specify your XML sitemap’s location in your robots.txt file, where the spiders are sure to find it then next time they come crawling. (A robots.txt file is simply a text file saved at the root of your website that gives instructions to visiting search engine spiders.) Your robots.txt file should look similar to this, with a Sitemap directive line for each of your different XML sitemaps:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /filename.html
Sitemap: http://website.com/my-sitemap1.xml
Sitemap: http://website.com/my-sitemap2.xml

That’s it! Once you create your XML sitemaps and tell search engines where to find them using your robots.txt file, the search engine spiders should do the rest. If you need more details on creating a Sitemap, see Google’s Search Console Help.

Next in the SEO tutorial, you’ll learn how to use rich media elements properly to make your site more engaging and more rankable.

Using Rich Media to Engage Your Site Visitors

How Rich Media Can Boost Your Website Rankings
Search engine results pages (SERPs) often give searchers a blend of different types of content, all within a single set of web results. Blended results may include web pages, images, news, shopping and more. Remember that the search engines want to serve their “customer” (the searcher) the most satisfying set of results possible. It makes sense that they would present a buffet of different result types to choose from, especially when the searcher’s intent is not entirely clear.

Incorporating multimedia items into your content makes your web pages more appealing to engines and searchers alike, and more competitive against other pages that may not be as multimedia-rich and engaging.

How’s Your Site’s Rich Media Experience?
Do a quick search on a keyword or phrase you would like to rank for and visit the websites of your top three to five SERP competitors.

What kinds of engaging elements are being used (or not used) on their websites?
Do you see ways to enhance your marketing strategy using multimedia content elements you can see, hear and/or click? Without these engagement objects, your site may not rank as high as competitors who do have them.

The most engaging websites:

Make use of original rich media elements
Are seen as higher quality, and
Have more opportunities to rank in SERPs as a result.

Adding rich media to your web pages and creating multimedia content are important parts of the SEO process and should not be overlooked.

Once you’ve identified ways to enhance your website with engagement objects, be sure to optimize them for your keywords and phrases, just as you would any other piece of content (more on that in the next lesson!). Now, let’s look at the different types of content that are most commonly used to engage website visitors and improve user experience.

The Nitty Gritty: What is Rich Media?
There are many types of content you can add to your web pages to help improve the visibility of your website in SERPs.

Rich media includes any content elements you can see, hear or click. You might use videos, images, audio, maps, charts, infographics, and many more. Any of these make tasty garnishes to complement your main course of text on any given webpage.

Videos and images are among the most commonly used forms of engagement objects that have made their way to the top of SERPs.

Just to whet your appetite, here are nine types of rich media elements you can use to increase engagement and conversions on your website:

Videos
Photos and other images
Audio clips and podcasts
Slide presentations
Infographics
GIF animations
Polls and quizzes
Maps
Graphs and charts

With so many choices of rich media objects that could engage new and returning visitors, you probably have some creative ideas bouncing around. The next step in the SEO guide explains each type in more depth, and teaches you how to use and optimize rich media to create multimedia content that will serve users and help you rank higher in search results.

Video Optimization Best Practices for SEO
As the “Why Use Video?” infographic above explains, video is a key factor in SEO. Bruce Clay considers it to be the most important engagement element to have in your multimedia content arsenal. In fact, Google has a vested interest in video since it owns YouTube, which has become the second most popular search engine on the web.

Making videos doesn’t require a huge investment in equipment and software, or even a lot of tech savvy anymore. Some simple low-end options include smartphone videos, screen-capture videos, and live video conferences, in which multiple participants have a conversation from remote locations, filmed with their laptop mics and cameras, and automatically turned into a video.

Whether your videos are recorded with your webcam or high-end productions, you’ll need to follow some SEO tips to help your videos rank better in search:

Format: Save your video in a format search engines can read, such as MPG, MPEG, MOV, M4V and WMV among several others.

Hosting: Use YouTube (or a similar video hosting site, like Vimeo) to host your video and then embed it on your site. This enables the video to be found in YouTube searches, as well as web and video searches in Google, Bing, etc.
Branding: Make your brand name or website URL visible if you host the video on a third-party site like YouTube. For instance, upload it to your brand’s YouTube channel, and show your brand name in the video (a subtle reference near the end works well).
Tags: Place keywords in the video’s file name, description and keyword tags.
Surrounding text: Optimize text around the embedded video with relevant keywords. Describe what the video is about so readers know what to expect and search engines can make sense of your video.
Transcript: Create and upload a transcript, or use YouTube subtitles and captions as a transcript alternative. (SEO tip: Your keyword targets should be mentioned in the video, so they’ll naturally appear in the transcript.)
Sitemap: Create and submit a video XML sitemap to make it easier for search engines to find and index your video content. (See Step 9 for more on creating XML sitemaps.)

Audio and Podcast Optimization for SEO
Audio is a great way to add value to your existing content while enhancing the user experience.
Music sites are not the only ones that can offer quality audio files for visitors to listen to. Non-music sites can find ways to enrich the visitor’s experience using audio. (Note: Let the visitor control whether audio plays, rather than starting the sound automatically, as a courtesy.)

A podcast is a digital audio file that can be downloaded or streamed from the web. Widespread internet access in cars and phones has enabled podcasts to resurge as a popular way to consume content. Millions of people listen to podcasts every day to learn new skills, get news and entertainment, or hear an audio book — among many other reasons to listen to podcasts.

Consider hosting a podcast if you have lessons, news recaps, interviews, or some other type of audio content that would be interesting and useful for your audience to digest on a regular basis.

Here are a few tips for incorporating audio files (podcasts, music or other) as multimedia content on your site:

Quality: Choose audio files with good sound quality.
File naming: Optimize audio file names with relevant keywords just as you would for image or video files.
Relevant text: Similar to video, you can create and provide a transcript that includes mentions of your keywords. Also use the text surrounding the podcast/audio file to describe its contents and incorporate keywords.
Title, description: Make sure each episode of your podcast has its own unique title and description.

How to Optimize Website Content for SEO

Ready to launch some new content? Here’s where the rubber meets the road.
This SEO tutorial is LOADED with free tools and advice for how to optimize your website content according to what is natural among competitors. You’ll find our Single Page Analyzer and other free SEO tools below that are invaluable for measuring both your competitors’ and your own on-page content.

In this lesson:

Learn guidelines for how much content is required.
Run a free tool to find out specifically how much content YOU need for your web page optimization.
Look at competitors’ critical page elements to help you optimize your own.
Confirm that your web page content hits the mark using our most popular SEO tool.

How Many Keywords Per Page?
n general, write each web page around one primary keyword phrase and up to two secondary keyword phrases. Focused content yields stronger keyword relevance and better-satisfied visitors, too, because the page delivers what they searched for.

Site-wide, you may have hundreds or thousands of active keywords assigned to different pages. Your keyword list can grow as your website grows, as long as you have enough content to support your relevance to each keyword.

Always be careful not to overuse, or “stuff,” keywords. As we stressed in Step 5, write for users naturally and go for quality. Just also incorporate keywords and related words strategically throughout the page (as explained in the previous step) to help search engines identify what your page is worthy of ranking for.

How Much Content is “Enough” for a Keyword?
To rank for a keyword, how much text per page and how many pages do you need?
Well, each page needs enough original text content to compete. The right amount will depend on what’s normal for that keyword. If all the top-ranking pages have 1000 words, then you’ll also need 1000 words of text. Competition aside, here are general SEO recommendations for page length:

Research pages: 500 to 600 words minimum per page
Ecommerce pages: 300 words minimum (shopping pages tend to have lots of product pictures)
Blog posts: 200 words minimum per post
As for how many pages will establish your relevance, you’ll need to match your competitors’ amount of content about that keyword. Here’s what to expect:

Non-competitive keywords: One relevant, high-quality content page about the keyword might be enough to rank, if the keyword falls within your overall site themes.
For competitive keywords: For tougher battles, you’ll need a landing page plus some subpages to support your subject relevance.

Landing pages are where you want people to “land” when they come from a SERP. A landing page should offer keyword-focused content. It should give searchers what they expected to find and provide a good first impression of your site.

For brand/main keywords: Some keywords naturally appear across many pages, strengthening your relevance site-wide. For example, our website is packed with resources on “digital marketing” and “SEO,” our main service descriptions, and our brand name, “Bruce Clay, Inc.” Almost every page naturally uses those site-wide keywords, though each term still has its own focused landing page.

Compare Keyword Usage on Competing Pages
As you’re writing the title, meta description, and other elements critical to your web page optimization, you may find it helpful to compare what your top competitors have written. Using our free SEO Multi-Page Information tool, you’ll be able to read the all-important title tag, meta tags, and H1 heading tag for many pages all at once, as well as whether the page has a rel=”canonical” tag.

Test Your Web Page Optimization Using the Single Page Analyzer
The most popular search engine optimization tool in our entire SEOToolSet® is our Single Page Analyzer, which lists the top keywords plus a whole lot more. The free version below, provided for you as an essential part of this SEO tutorial, shows a small fraction of that tool’s power.

Running the Single Page Analyzer shows you the density for your keywords in the various categories: title, meta description, meta keywords, image alt attributes, heading levels, first 200 words, and total body copy. It also analyzes the reading level and other metrics, so make sure those are appropriate for the audience you’re targeting.

Following our specified SEO web page optimization methodology, you can review these reports to see what you need to change or add to your pages. SEOs often run this tool several times as they test and adjust their web page’s optimization. The Single Page Analyzer reports show red to indicate a value that is too low, and blue for a value that’s abnormally high, based on SEO best practices.