Submit Your Site to Search Engines Learn how to submit your website to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex and famous free web directories.

www.webnots.com

CONTENTS

How do I Submit My Site to Search Engines? .........................................................................3

What to Submit with Search Engines? ....................................................................................3

How to Submit Your Site to Google? ...........................................................................5

Add and Verify your Site ..........................................................................................................5

Adding Your Site .......................................................................................................................5

Verify Your Site .........................................................................................................................6

How to Verify your Site is indexed? ........................................................................................7

How to monitor indexing and crawling statuses of my Site? ................................................7

Deleting Your Site .....................................................................................................................8

How to Submit Site to Bing / Yahoo!? ........................................................................9

Option1: Submit Your Site to Bing as anonymous .................................................................9

Option2: Submit using Bing Webmaster Tools.................................................................... 10

Add and Verify Site in Bing Webmaster Tools ..................................................................... 10

Adding Your Site .................................................................................................................... 11

Verifying Your Site ................................................................................................................. 12

Deleting Your Site .................................................................................................................. 14

Submit Your Site to Baidu Search Engine ............................................................... 15

What is Baidu? ....................................................................................................................... 15

Why do i need to submit my site to Baidu?......................................................................... 15

How do i submit my site to Baidu without Baidu Webmaster Tools account?................. 16

Content Guidelines for Baidu Site Submission .................................................................... 17

How to Add and Verify Site in Baidu Webmaster Tools? ................................................... 18

Adding Your Website ............................................................................................................. 19

Verify Your Site ...................................................................................................................... 20

Where to Paste the HTML Site Verification Code? ............................................................. 21

Site Manager Options............................................................................................................ 22

How to Submit Your Site to Yandex? ....................................................................... 24

Guidelines for Site Submission to Yandex ........................................................................... 25

Add and Verify Site in Yandex Webmaster Tools ................................................................ 25

Features Without Registration ............................................................................................. 26

Adding Your Site .................................................................................................................... 27

Verifying Your Site ................................................................................................................. 28

Deleting a Site and Revoking Access .................................................................................... 29

Submit Your Site to Best Free Web Directories .................................................... 31

What are Directories? ........................................................................................................... 31

Classification of Web Directories?........................................................................................ 31

HOW DO I SUBMIT MY SITE TO SEARCH ENGINES?

Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Baidu Webmaster Tools and Yandex Webmaster Tools are the way to submit your site to the respective search engines. Along with site submission they offer variety of other site optimization tools.

While Bing, Yandex and Baidu offers anonymous site submission, Google Webmaster Tools is the only way for webmasters to submit their site to the search engine giant Google. Consider also submitting your site to non-English search engines like Baidu and Yandex which has lot of potential to attract huge number of visitors to your site.

Search Engine Anonymous Submission Webmaster Tools

Google No Yes

Bing Yes Yes

Baidu Yes Yes

Yandex Yes Yes

Ideally search engines automatically crawls the web and index every newly created sites.

The purpose of manual submission is to inform the search engines that the site is owned

by you and in return to get the optimization suggestions exclusively applicable for your

site. For example if your site is down for some reasons without your knowledge,

Webmaster Tools indicates the access error so that you can recheck your site and

ensure it is up and running fine.

You can also submit your site to the free web directories which will also increase your

search engine results ranking.

WHAT TO SUBMIT WITH SEARCH ENGINES?

Whenever you submit your site URL normally all the pages of your site will be

considered for submission. But the final indexing depends on each search engine

algorithm and the quality of your content. This is the reason you may notice the

following differences between search engines:

Pages are indexed in Google but not in Bing or Yahoo! Number of indexed pages is high in Google but very few pages are indexed in

Bing. Long time for indexing, especially on Baidu and Yandex since they give

preference to Chinese and Russian content respectively.

Other than submitting your home page URL you also need to submit your blog RSS feed,

forum feed and XML Sitemap to inform the search engines about the structure and the

importance of the pages in your site.

Google in general index all your pages within few days of submitting your Sitemap

in Webmaster Tools account.

Below is the market share of search engines among English speaking users.

Search Engine Market Share

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE?

You should have a Webmaster Tools account in order to submit your site to Google.

Google does not allow anonymous site submission like other Search Engines. Since

Google holds more than 60% of the search engine market in English speaking countries,

it is the great and simple way for an organic traffic to your site.

Click the below button to open your webmaster tools account. You can use your

existing Gmail id for logging in or create a new account.

ADD AND VERIFY YOUR SITE

Your Blogger and Google Sites will appear automatically once you logged inside Webmaster Tools account. You may need to set your sites visible to the search engines in Blogger or Google Sites account.

For all other sites you need to add it to Webmaster Tools and verify it that you are the owner of that site. Note most of the free site builders like Weebly even though offers free site submission, Webmaster Tools provides various free features in addition to site submission for optimizing your site. For example Search Term analysis is a Pro feature in Weebly which is totally free in Webmaster Tools.

ADDING YOUR SITE

After Sign in Webmaster Tools select the link "Add Site", enter your site URL and click on "Continue".

Add a Site

Create Google WMT Account

VERIFY YOUR SITE

Once you enter your site URL and select Continue button, Webmaster Tools offers various methods to verify your site ownership. Google recommends downloading and uploading HTML file to your site and this method needs you to have an access to root directory of your site.

We recommend the easy way of using HTML tag in your site's header section which is available under Alternate methods tab. You don't need to have an access to root directory of your site in this method.

Various Methods for Verification

The verification code is displayed once you select the HTML tag radio button.

HTML Verification Code

Copy the verification code and paste it into the header section of your site. In order to monitor all the pages in your site you need to paste this HTML code in all individual pages.

Once you pasted the verification code and publish your site, Webmaster Tools automatically detects the code and displays the message for successful verification of your site ownership.

Verification Confirmed Successfully

If you do not see any data appearing for your site, then try adding both www and non-

www versions of your site. They are considered as two different sites from Webmaster

Tools perspective.

Your site is now submitted to Google. Google will index your site and display in the search results pages when someone searches query related to your content.

HOW TO VERIFY YOUR SITE IS INDEXED?

Generally it will take a week time to crawl your site and index in the search engine’s database. You can check it in the Google search box by entering “site:yoursitename.com” to ensure whether any pages of your site is indexed or not.

If the pages are indexed but not showing top in the search results pages, then the quality of the content is to be improved to show top in the search results.

HOW TO MONITOR INDEXING AND CRAWLING STATUSES OF MY

SITE?

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to check the crawling errors and number of pages indexed from your site. In addition, it offers many free services like Sitemap submission, Traffic Analysis and link counts, which are to be used for analyzing and optimizing your site for Google Search Engine.

Learn More about Google Webmaster Tools here.

DELETING YOUR SITE

You can delete your site from the Webmaster Tools account anytime if you want. The option for deletion is available under "Manage Site > Delete Site".

Adding or deleting your site in Webmaster Tools account will not affect your site's ranking in Google search results, it is only a tool to monitor and improve your site's performance in Google search engine.

Delete a Site

HOW TO SUBMIT SITE TO BING / YAHOO!?

You have two options for submitting your site to Bing Search Engine.

1. Anonymous Site submission - You will just submit your site and will not know any further information.

2. Using Bing Webmaster Tools – You will know the crawling errors and have many other options to optimize your site for Bing Search Engine.

Both Yahoo and Bing Search use a common Bing search engine; hence you can pull

traffic from Yahoo and Bing by submitting your site to Bing Search Engine.

Bing and Yahoo! together hold over 30% of the search engine market share in English

speaking countries. Bing also has partnered with Baidu, the famous search engine in

China, for displaying English search results.

OPTION1: SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO BING AS ANONYMOUS

You can also submit your site to Bing as anonymous without registering for Webmaster Tools account. The only difference is you may not be able to avail other free services from Bing if you choose this option.

Click here to submit your site to Bing.

Once submitted you will be shown a message for successful submission and offered to sign in for Bing WMT account.

Submit Site to Bing

OPTION2: SUBMIT USING BING WEBMASTER TOOLS

You need to sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools or you can use your Windows Live ID if you already have one Signup here.

After logged inside Webmaster Tools, you can use "Add a Site" link to submit your site to Bing. Once you add your site then you need to verify the ownership of your site. Bing offers three methods to verify your site.

a. Place an XML file on your web server b. Copy and Paste a <meta> tag in your default webpage c. Add CNAME record to DNS

As an easy method, you can choose the second one, copy and paste the code in meta tag of your home page. It may take a few days for Bing to crawl and index your site in the database.

Bing also offers various other features like SEO Reports, SEO Analyzer, Markup Validator, Site Activities and Sitemap submission.

Learn More about Bing Webmaster Tools here.

ADD AND VERIFY SITE IN BING WEBMASTER TOOLS

Bing is the search engine used by both Bing and Yahoo! having over 30% of search engine market share. You can submit your site to Bing anonymously as well as through Bing Webmaster Tools account. This article explains how to add your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and various verification methods available.

Bing Webmaster Tools Login

It is highly recommended to have registered account in order to make use of all the

features available in Bing Webmaster Tools. Click here to register for a free account.

You can also login to your account using Microsoft's account like Hotmail or Windows

Live.

ADDING YOUR SITE

Once you logged in to your account, you can see an "Add a Site" box. Enter your site URL

and click on the "ADD" button. Remember to enter the correct URL with WWW or

without WWW, since they are considered as two different sites from Bing's perspective.

Add a Site

In the "About my website" screen, you have the following options:

1. Check and correct the previously entered URL - Mandatory 2. Enter your Sitemap URL - Optional 3. Set a time for Bingbot crawling your site - Optional

Add Site in Bing Webmaster Tools

Click on the "ADD" button once you entered the required details.

VERIFYING YOUR SITE

Bing Webmaster Tools will provide you three options to verify your site.

Verification Methods in Yandex Webmaster Tools

Option 1 - XML File Upload

Download the BingSiteAuth.xml file under the option 1. Upload the file in your site's root directory. You need to have an access to your

site's root directory in order to upload a file. Check your file upload by opening the URL

"http://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml" in the browser. (Replace example.com with your site name).

Click on the "Verify" button.

Option 2 - HTML meta tag Verification

This is the simple and recommended method which does not require access to your site's root directory.

Copy and paste the HTML meta code in your site's header section. You need to paste the verification code in each individual pages of your site in order to help Bing to crawl and provide more accurate information about your site.

Once pasted the code publish your site and then click on the "Verify button". Example of using meta tag is shown below:

Option 3 - Adding CNAME Record in DNS

In this method again you need to have an access to your site's DNS settings. Add a CNAME record as given in your verification screen and point it to

"verify.bing.com". If you are not sure how to do this, then select the DNS provider from the list and

then Bing search will help you with the related search results. DNS changes may take up to 48 hours to propagate; hence you may need to wait

sometime if your verification is failed.

Once your site is successfully verified, you can see a message in the same screen next to

"Verify" button. You can also "Cancel" the verification and do it later any point of time.

Yandex Site Verification

If you want to change the method of verification for already verified site then you can

go to "Verify Ownership" option available under "Configure My Site" section.

Verify Site Ownership

DELETING YOUR SITE

Site Dashboards will show all the sites added in your account. You have an option to

click on the unverified site to verify it as explained in the above section. You can select

any site or all the sites and delete from your Bing Webmaster Tools account. Note

deleting or adding your site in Webmaster Tools account will not affect your site's

ranking in search results.

My Sites Dashboard

SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO BAIDU SEARCH ENGINE

WHAT IS BAIDU?

Baidu is a search engine used in China having more than 75% of the market share. It is also widely used search engine among the Chinese or Mandarin speaking community in most part of the world including Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Baidu Search Engine in China

WHY DO I NEED TO SUBMIT MY SITE TO BAIDU?

Chinese are one of the highest internet users in the world and approximately one

million English searches are carried out in China per day.

Baidu has more than 75% of the search engine market share in China while Google has

over 15%. Moreover Microsoft is having a tie up with Baidu for the English search results,

that means the English search results in Baidu will use Bing search engine and then the

results will be displayed in Baidu’s Search result pages.

Search Engine Market Share in China

Even your site is not in Chinese language, we highly recommend submitting your site to

Baidu. Your traffic will increase multifold if you can index your site in Baidu search

engine.

HOW DO I SUBMIT MY SITE TO BAIDU WITHOUT BAIDU

WEBMASTER TOOLS ACCOUNT?

Visit Here and follow the below instructions, Baidu offers site submission only in Chinese both for anonymous submission as well as through Baidu WMT.

The website needs to be submitted only once with the home page URL, Baidu search engine automatically includes all other pages of your site.

1. Enter your website URL 2. Enter the verification code 3. Press the Submit button

Baidu Site Submission

4. You will receive a success message as below. Make sure the URL in the address bar ends with "success.html".

Baidu Site Submit - Confirmation Message

CONTENT GUIDELINES FOR BAIDU SITE SUBMISSION

• No sexual and offensive content

Make sure you do not have any pornography and politically controversial content in your site. China has a great internet censorship and if your site has any illegal content there is no possibility of indexed by Baidu.

• At least have a single page of your site in Chinese

It is recommended to have a complete Chinese site for Baidu, if not possible make sure at least one page in your site is in Chinese. Add the below meta tag in your Chinese page to inform the crawler that your page is in Chinese.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="ZH">

If you are planning to translate your site then ensure all the keywords are translated into your new site. Unlike Google, Baidu will not index the new English sites faster; hence submitting your new English site may not bring immediate traffic and you may need to wait for a considerable time for Baidu to index your site’s pages.

• Create your site with a Chinese domain and host it from China

Baidu prefers to index the sites hosted in China. You can easily find a Chinese hosting service having servers in China. Your domain name will end with .cn or .com.cn.

You can also submit your site to Baidu through Baidu Webmaster Tools account which offers various site optimization tools along with the URL and Feed submission to Baidu search engine.

Learn more about Baidu Webmaster Tools.

HOW TO ADD AND VERIFY SITE IN BAIDU WEBMASTER TOOLS?

Baidu is the famous search engine and number one traffic ranked site in China. Baidu

predominantly offer searches in Chinese and also offer English searches in partnership

with Bing.

Baidu also offers Webmaster Tools to enable webmasters to monitor various site

parameters and performance in Baidu search engine. The problem is currently Baidu

Webmaster Tools is only available in Chinese which makes webmasters a bit hard to add

and verify their site.

Here we eliminate the hassle of translation for webmasters and explain how to add and verify a website in Baidu Webmaster Tools account using English notations. Learn more about Baidu Webmaster Tools features here.

Click here to login to your Baidu webmaster tools account. You may need to register for a new account in case if you do not have an existing account.

Login to Baidu Webmaster Tools

ADDING YOUR WEBSITE

Once you login to your webmaster tools account, go to the first option (Site Management) as shown in the below picture. Here you can see the "Add New Site" button.

Add Your Site in Baidu Webmaster Tools Account

Clicking on the "Add New Site" button, you will be taken to the next screen asking your site URL. Enter your site URL and click OK button.

Enter Site URL

Remember to enter correct URL of your website, for example "www.webnots.com"

and "webnots.com" are two different sites from webmaster tools perspective. You can

check it by opening your XML Sitemap in a browser with and without 'www' and use

the correct site for which Sitemap exist.

VERIFY YOUR SITE

After adding your site you will get a popup providing you the options for verifying your site. Site verification is mandatory in order to access site specific features in webmaster tools account.

You have three options to verify your website with Baidu webmaster tools.

Option1 - File Upload

Download the verification file and upload it into your website's root directory. Option2 - HTML Tag Verification

A common method, copy and paste the HTML code into the header section of your website.

Option3 - CNAME Settings

Copy the CNAME record and set it in your site's DNS settings pointing to zz.baidu.com.

Site Verification Options

Once you completed any of the verification method then click the "Verify Now" button. You can also cancel the verification and verify it any point of time later.

Even though Baidu recommends waiting 6 hours for the verification, it will normally take only a few minutes after you published your website. In case of verification is failed you will see a message after clicking on the verify button, this means you may need to wait for some more time before you click on verify again.

WHERE TO PASTE THE HTML SITE VERIFICATION CODE?

It is important to paste the HTML code correctly in your site to verify your site in Baidu Webmaster Tools. Below is the suggested example showing how to paste the code between <head> </head> tags.

You need to paste this verification code in-between the header section of every pages

of your site in order to monitor the performance of every pages of your website.

File Upload and CNAME settings need administrator access to your site's root directory

which means you should own the top level domain of your site whereas HTML tag

verification method does not need access to root directory.

SITE MANAGER OPTIONS

Once your site is verified it will be automatically added to your Site Manager. Site Manager shows the complete list of sites under your webmaster tools account along with other details.

<html>

<head>

<meta name="baidu-site-verification" content="7V6m4wr5FrLko2q2" />

<title>My title</title>

</head>

<body>

Your Webpage Content

</body>

</html>

Baidu Webmaster Tools Site Manager

You also have an option to delete your site any time from Baidu webmaster tools account.

Learn here how to get Baidu Search Box Code for your website.

Baidu webmaster tools generates unique verification code for each site added

unlike Google and Bing Webmaster Tools where one single verification code can be

used for all the sites under one account.

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO YANDEX?

Yandex is a leading search engine in Russia having more than 60% of market share. Yandex also offers searches in English which means you have a potential to extract traffic from Russia. You also have an option to submit your site anonymously without registering for Yandex webmaster Tool.

Click here to submit your URL to Yandex.

Enter your Site URL, verification code and submit your site.

Yandex Anonymous Site Submission

Before adding the URL you have an option to check whether your site is already indexed in Yandex database or not by using Check URL option.

Check URL option in Yandex

GUIDELINES FOR SITE SUBMISSION TO YANDEX

Yandex prefers the site with Russian content and hosted in Russia. Hence, if you are planning to submit your site to Yandex make sure at least a single page in your site is in Russian. You can include the following meta tag in your Russian page so that Yandex crawler will understand that the page is in Russian.

<META http-equiv="Content-Language" content="RU">

You can submit your site to Yandex through Yandex Webmaster Tools.

Learn More about Yandex Webmaster Tools here.

ADD AND VERIFY SITE IN YANDEX WEBMASTER TOOLS

Yandex is a famous search engine having more than 60% of search engine market share in Russia. Even though Yandex offers searches primarily in Russian language it also offers Webmaster Tools account in English with limited features to help site owners submitting their sites to Yandex search engine.

This article explains how to add your site in Yandex Webmaster Tools, various verification methods and features available without registration.

FEATURES WITHOUT REGISTRATION

You can submit your site to Yandex without having a Webmaster Tools account also. In

addition to site submission you can also avail the following features without registration:

Check your site is indexed by Yandex Analyze your site's Robots.txt Report spam search result and remove your URL from search Validate your Sitemap, XML feed and microformats

Features without Registration

It is highly recommended to have registered account in order to make use of all the

utilities available in Yandex Webmaster Tools.

Yandex Login

Click here to register for a free account.

Once you registered and activated your account, Click here to login to your account.

You can also login to your account using Facebook, Twitter or Google account.

ADDING YOUR SITE

Once you logged in to your account, click on the "Add Site" link.

Add a Site

Enter your site URL in the box and click on "Add site" button. Remember to enter a correct URL with or without WWW since they are two different sites from Yandex perspective. Any sites already added in your account will be shown under "Already added" section.

VERIFYING YOUR SITE

The next step is to verify the ownership of your site and Yandex offers four methods to verify your site ownership.

Verification Methods in Yandex Webmaster Tools

HTML File Upload:

In this method you need to download a HTML file and then upload it in your site's root directory. Meta Tag:

This is a simple and recommended method which does not require access to your site's root directory. Copy the HTML code and paste it in your site's header section. You need to paste this code in all the pages of your site in order to monitor all the pages. Txt File:

Create an empty text file with the specified name provided by Yandex and upload it in your site's root directory.

By DNS:

Create a CNAME record as provided by Yandex in your site's DNS setting.

Once you have completed any of the verification method don't forget to publish your site and then click on the "Check" button to see whether Yandex search engine can

reach your site. It may take few minutes for Yandex to check the relevant verification file or code is inserted in your site.

Yandex Site Verification

DELETING A SITE AND REVOKING ACCESS

All the verified sites will appear in "My Sites" section of your account and you can delete your site any time later if you want. Note deleting or adding your site in Webmaster Tools account will not affect your site's ranking in search results. Verifying a site will inform search engines that the site is created by a human and there exist a site owner to monitor the performance of the site in the search engine. In addition site owners can use the free features like Sitemap submission, Preferred Domain setting and Geographic setting.

My Sites Dashboard

You also have an option to revoke the verification rights anytime later for a particular site added in your account and the option is available under the "Verification" tab as shown in the below picture. Once the access is revoked the status will be changed to

"Unconfirmed" and you need to verify your site again in order to access all the features in your account.

Revoke Access

SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO BEST FREE WEB DIRECTORIES

Click here to submit your site to the following free Web Directories to improve your web

traffic and search engine ranking. Recommendation is based on the Google PageRank of

the directories which is mentioned next to the site URL. For the ease of submission

clicking the link will directly take you to the submit URL page of the directory.

WHAT ARE DIRECTORIES?

Directory is the place where you can find list of websites based on category and subcategory. Web directories just collate the links of all websites and display under classified categories and they list the whole site rather than each page of a website. RSS directories are same as web directories but contain RSS feeds instead of site links.

Submitting your site to directories is equivalently important as submitting your site to search engines. Most of the search engines will automatically fetch data from the directories and started indexing pages.

Some of directories do not allow search engine crawlers to fetch their links and only used by human. Here we discuss best directories available for your site submission especially for the effectiveness of SEO purpose.

When you submit your site make sure you select appropriate category and subcategory. It may take up to few months for the directories to link your site and some of the directories offer only paid submission.

CLASSIFICATION OF WEB DIRECTORIES?

Web directories can be classified under three categories:

1. General Directories:

These are general directories linking all type of sites under relevant categories and subcategories after reviewing.

2. Special Directories:

If you are interested in submitting your site only to the relevant audience then special directories are highly recommended.

3. Reciprocal Directories:

It is a kind of link exchange where they will list your site only if you are backlinking them in your site.

Following are the directories you can submit your site for quality traffic and search

engine ranking.

General Directories

AboutUs.org

Ansearch

Best of the Web Directory

JoeAnt

Open Directory Project or DMOZ

Starting Point Directory

World Wide Web Virtual Library

Yahoo! Directory

Some Special Directories

Biographicon – A Special directory for biographical entries

Business.com – Business directory that charges a fee for review and operates as

a Pay per click search engine.

Requires reciprocal link

You can find plenty of reciprocal link directories in the web which we do not

recommend from SEO perspective.