How do I get my website listed in all the search engines?

Below we'll show you how to submit your website to search engines, but there are actually many more important issues you need to address if you want people to find your website on search engines. This is part of a greater discussion about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how to improve your ranking to increase the organic traffic that finds your website. See our SEO article on that topic for more details.

Search Engine Submissions

Many search engines allow you to submit your site directly to them for faster consideration. When your site is submitted, they will know that it exists and soon send out little spiders (programs which scour your site) to index the content, and eventually you will be added to their search results. This can take some time, they don't make any promises. If you don't submit your site, you site will probably eventually be found by their spiders, but it can take a lot longer. Generally it is recommended that you only take the time to submit your site to the top search engines. Once your site makes it into their index, others will pick it up and you're rankings will be based on your site's popularity and the content available. Some links can be found below for your reference, enter your domain name (it only takes a second) and then they'll get around to indexing it in their own good time. Just be patient.

• Google (~67%): https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
• Bing (~18%): http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
• Yahoo (~10%): http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

You also may want to add your site to the DMOZ Open Directory Project, which is a the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. See instructions here: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

We recommend that you do not rely on search engine results alone for people to find your site. Traditional advertising is still useful, as well as word of mouth, business cards, newsletters and personal contacts. Search engines are helpful, but your strategy must be more diverse. We personally receive about 95% of our business from word of mouth referrals. This means our clients immediately trust us and it makes it easier for us to do good work for them. So don't neglect the old fashioned methods, sometimes they may not bring in the same number of contacts, but they are always more solid.

You shouldn't neglect the importance of search engines, though. And you should realize that if your site has a lot of good information that is helpful for visitors, then people will visit it and link to it and it will naturally rise in the search engine rankings. The best way to achieve this is by providing fresh, interesting and helpful content. There are a lot of SEO gimmicks out there, but most of them don't work or at best are bad business practices. See our SEO article for more about this.