How To Submit You Website To Google and Bing – 037

Get Your Website Submitted To Google and Bing And Have Your Pages Indexed For Search Listings

Learn how to submit your website to Google and Bing, to make sure your pages are indexed and available to show up on search engine results pages (SERP). The only reliable way to accomplish this is to use the Google Search Console to submit your website to Google, and to use Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your website to Bing. In this weeks episode we’ll walk you through the basics on how to get your website submitted, make sure the Google and Bing know about new pages, and ensure that your pages able to be found by the search engines!

YOU’LL LEARN

• The only way to submit your website to Google
• Setup your account in Google Search console (GSC) to submit your website
• You need to submit a sitemap in your GSC account
• Your sitemap acts like a Table of Contents for Google, to help them understand your website pages
• You should be using a WordPress plugin or some other method to auto-update your sitemap when you create new content
• You can manually submit a page to Google by going to the Fetch as Google in the Crawl section of Google Search Console
• The process to submit your website to Bing is very similar to submitting to Google via Bing Webmaster Tools

Here is the transcription from Episode 37 How To Submit You Website To Google and Bing;

Jesse:Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics. I’m Jesse Dolan, here with Bob Brennan, as always. This week, we’re gonna be talking about how to get your website submitted to Google and to Bing, the two major search engines. We’ve touched on this a little bit before in a previous episode, about using Google Search Console, and we’ll put a link to that in our show notes. There’s gonna be some good information in there that we’re not gonna touch on. Today, we’re just gonna be talking about how to submit your website to be found, not so much the features of Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, but just focusing on that.

The reason that triggered this is in late July … Google used to have an add URL link on their website, where anybody could just add a page or add a website publicly with Google. They got rid of that in late July. It was somewhere around July 23rd or something like that, July 24th, if I remember right. So, now the only way to submit your website to Google is to go through the Google Search Console. You have to have an account to do that, so again, refer back to the previous episode. We kind of talk about how to do that, so we’re gonna kind of blow through that real quick. The address to get set up for that is Google.com/Webmasters, and if you already have a Google account, you just log in with that. You’ll have to jump through a couple hoops real quick. You’d have to verify your website that you’re gonna be setting up in your dashboard to prove that you own it. Through there is how you’re gonna submit it to Google.

You’re not gonna just plug it in and say, “Here’s my website. Let’s do this.” You have to use something that’s called a site map. If you’re using WordPress, there’s a lot of really good plugins out there that allow you to do this. If you’re not using WordPress, we’ll put a link to some of the ones that we recommend for people. We don’t have any horse in the race in those. They’re just ones that we use ourselves. … and how to generate that site map. If you use WordPress, which hopefully you are, because that’s rock solid, super easy to use. The cool part about that, if you’re using Yoast for example as the plugin to generate your sitemap, it automatically updates it.

Once you get into Google and you set this up, what the sitemap is is it’s kind of like your index, right? Or your chapter listing, however you want to visualize that, of all your pages on your website. You give that to Google, ad that’s gonna give Google a list of all your pages. If you’re using something like Yoast with WordPress, if you go out and you make a new page, or a new post, or even if you want images to be found on there too, if you add a new image to your website, it’s gonna automatically update that sitemap. Once why kind of give it to Google, from now going forward they’re gonna look at this link and say, “Is there any new pages here that we should worry about?” If they find one linked on there, then they’re gonna put it into their index, and so it can be found in the search engine.

If you’re not using something like Yoast with WordPress, it’s a little bit more of a manual process. So, let’s just say you’re using a traditional HTML coded website, and you add half a dozen new pages today. If you’re not using a service that automatically generates your sitemap for you and then republishes it, you’re gonna have to do that manually, because Google’s still gonna look at that address where you put that sitemap and say, “Well, this is all of their webpages.” If you didn’t update that sitemap, if you didn’t update your table of contents or your index, if you will, they don’t know that there’s new content there, so you’ll have to regenerate that, and re-upload it, and go through that.

Now, it doesn’t mean if you don’t do this, Google’s never gonna find your content. They can still follow links. If somebody links to your content from another website or within your website, if you’re linking to that new content, they’re still gonna find it eventually. We’re not really wanting Google to just take their own time and do this though. If we put out some new content, we want them to know immediately that we put out new content, so that content can be found and show up in search results. We don’t want to have to wait days, weeks, or months for that to happen. Your best bet for your stuff to get found is to utilize that sitemap, be aware, if you’re kind of doing the manual process, that you’re gonna have to do that yourself to let Google know, and best case, again, if you haven’t converted to WordPress yet or if you can’t for some reason, then sorry, but that is the best, but if you can convert to WordPress, I mean, right there is just a great reason to jump on-board if you can. If you need any help on that, you can reach out to us. We can point you in the right direction or even give you a hand. Intrycks.com/Show, as always, for that.

But let me kind of roll back a little bit, because I kind of got a little bit ahead there talking about the sitemaps, just kind of wanted to make that clear. To submit your website to Google, again, you gotta set up an account, Google Search Console. You do have to verify that you own the website. After that, then you have to go to the spot to actually submit your website to Google. Google has a new search console that some people kind of default to that. It’ll say beta up in the top, left hand corner. If you don’t like that, then I would recommend using the old one still at this point. You just scroll down to the bottom, left corner. It says go to the old version. Then you use kind of the classic version of the Google Search Console. Within there you would go to the top, right corner. You’ll see it, where it says sitemaps, and there’ll be a big red button that says add a sitemap. You can also update your sitemap there too, if you’re doing this manually. You’d go there and resubmit it to them if something changes.

Now, if for some reason you have a page that’s just not showing up … I’ve got my sitemap. I can find my new pages listed in my sitemap, because that’s something you can still look at yourself. It’s kind of technical to look at. It’s not pretty. It’s just a bunch of words and codes, but you should be able to see your new pages on there. Kind of a cool trick for that, at least if you’re on a Windows PC, is Control+F, which F stands for find. If you’re on any webpage, like your sitemap, instead of trying to read that whole thing, which might take a long time, and trying to find your words, just hit Control+F, and then type in what you’re looking for, right? So, if you’re looking for the new page about dog toys, hit Control+F dog toys, and that’s gonna highlight and bring you on the page wherever it’s finding those words like that. Kind of a little pro tip that that saves you a lot of time and makes it super easy to find information like that, especially on a page that’s just mashed full of text, like your sitemap would be.

So, at any rate, if you’re in a position where you say, “My page is on my sitemap. Google should be finding it, but I’m not seeing it in my index pages, and I can’t find it anywhere on Google,” you can manually submit a page still. So, you can’t do this in the new Google Search Console. You do have to use the old version, so hopefully they’re gonna introduce this feature back into the new version at some point here. At the time of this recording it’s still not available, but everybody’s kind of clamoring for it.

What you would do is you would go to the crawl section on the left hand side menu. Then you want to go fetch as Google. So, what you’re gonna do there is you’re gonna enter in the exact page that you’re wanting to do, and then you click fetch. Google’s gonna go out and basically try to pull that page. If it can actually find that page with the address that you plugged in, it’ll give you a little, green icon. It’s not a thumbs up, but it’s essentially like a thumbs up. Good. We found it. From there you can hit submit for indexing, which means … so, Google ha found the page. Now, you want to say, “Go ahead and put this in your file cabinet to be found for later.” It usually takes about two days, from what we’ve seen, for them to go through that process and get into the index, and you should be good to go.

So, just to kind of reset on the Google Search Console part, to submit your website to Google you gotta have an account at the GSC, Google Search Console. You’ve got to have a sitemap to submit to them that lists all your pages. Then from there if you need a manual submission, you can do that through the fetch and submit tool there. I definitely wouldn’t recommend anybody say, “Well, if I can just manually submit pages, I don’t need to do a sitemap. You know, I’ll just submit my pages one-by-one here. Number one, it’s gonna take you forever. Number tow, after a few submissions they make you do the stupid, little I’m not a robot. Click here. Pick the signs. Pick the cars, and all that. It’s gonna be super, super tedious. You’re gonna waste way more time doing that than you would if you just went and did the stinking sitemap the right way in the first place.

Then moving forward, every time you create a new page, that sitemap is gonna automatically update. You’re just gonna want to stick with that. That’s definitely the best option. That’s Google. We’re gonna switch over to Bing real quick, because you do want to be found on Bing too. We’ve talked on previous episodes, and again, we’ll link to this one in the show notes.

Bob: It’s 10% of the searches.

Jesse: 10% or more. It can be up to 30%, depending on the industry. We talked back in episode 26 about that. We’ll put a link there. You want to do Bing too. You can’t just take it for granted and skip it. You gotta get yourself in there. For that you need to sign up. Go through Bing.com/Toolbox/Webmaster. We’ll put a link to this in the show notes as well to make it real easy for everybody, Intrycks.com/Show. From there you do have to sign in. If you’ve got a Hotmail address or if you have a work … an Outlook account, or something like that, you can sign in using that or set up a new account. Super easy.

Once you’re into Bing, they’re gonna have a bar right up at top to add your website. You’ve got to go through a similar process, just like you would for Google. You have to verify that it’s your website, so they’re gonna make you install some kind of a tag or maybe even upload a file. They just want to prove that you have access to this website, that you own it, and then you can kind of manage it in the dashboard here. So, you gotta go through that process as well. Again, I’ll roll back and say if you’re using WordPress and you have Yoast installed on WordPress, they make is super easy to do this verification on both Google and Bing to show that you own the website. I recommend that for another reason as well right there.

After you’ve got your website verified and prove that you own it in Bing, same thing here. You’re gonna wanna submit your sitemap to Bing as well. When you’re initially setting up your website in Bing, they’ll have a spot where you can paste it in there. If for some reason you skip that or you need to do it later, in the left hand menu under the configure my site, you’ll see a link that says sitemap. Click that, and you enter in the same link that you would for Google to submit your sitemap, and all that works just like Google. Same thing. They’re gonna be monitoring your sitemap looking for changes. They’ll automatically add your pages to their index when they find them in your sitemap.

Again, if you have a link that’s either not working or maybe you want to do it manually, they also have a link under the configure my site. It’s submit URLs. Same thing here. You just kind of put it in there manually. You hit submit. It’s not like Google, where you got to fetch it and submit it for indexing, so not the exact same process, but very similar in spirit. Put your link in there and submit it to them. Then they know that they’re gonna be looking for it. Those are the too ways. You’re definitely gonna want to do Google and Bing. Bing also feeds Yahoo and some other kind of ancillary search engines. That’s part of what makes it so popular, up to that 10 to 30%, depending on your market, for those searches.

Bob: When you’re talking about sitemap, that’s aspecific page within your site that has a table of contents of sorts for the whole site. By using Yoast … Basically Yoast is some kind of an SEO tool of sorts, right?

Jesse: SEO plugin for WordPress. Yup. It does some other stuff too, but yeah. It automatically does the sitemaps.

Bob: So, it automatically, by using the Yoast tool, you can actually just give the Yoast address or the address for the Yoast plugin, so to speak, to it, and it does its deal. Is that what you just kind of explained?

Jesse: Yeah. If you had WordPress, just to kind of walk through that real quick, you’d install Yoast as a plugin, which is free. They have paid versions, but use the free one. Then there’s a button in there to … I believe a default, it’s enabled, but even if not, you’re gonna wanna go in there and kind of manually configure it to set up your sitemap, so you can say, “What content do I want listed on my sitemap?” You might not want your images listed on your sitemap, let’s say, for example. Maybe if you do blog posts and webpages, but you don’t want your blog posts to be indexed in the search engines for some reason, right? So, you can basically of through … They’re little toggles, like yes or no essentially or enable/disable I think technically. You go through the type of content that you want on the sitemap, and it’s saved.

After that, you’ll have a link that is what you need, where the sitemap is actually gonna be. That’s what you’re gonna copy, so it’ll be Intrycks.com/sitemap, let’s say, .xml or whatever it is. That’s the link you’re gonna copy. Yoast will generate it and kind of make that page on your website for you. Then you gotta copy and paste that into Google and Bing. Yoast is one of our favorites. We use it on virtually all of our websites. There’s some competitors out there that are pretty good too. There’s All In One SEO. That’s probably the other big, main one, but basically what it does is … There’s, again, different levels and purchases you can make for it, but out of the box for the default free one the main things we like about it is the sitemap for you. It allows you to authenticate your website with Google and Bing, to prove you have the ownership in a super easy way.

Then it also allows you to kind of grade your pages. Without getting too deep into the details on that, basically when you go to make your page in WordPress or even edit your page, it’ll have a stoplight of different SEO features. Your goal is to make the stoplight green right off the top. Good. It’s green. You’re ready to go. It’ll kind of break down some areas for you, like maybe you don’t have enough text on your page, or maybe you repeated your keyword too many times, or maybe your page … They actually go through a readability score, like, “Hey. Your grammar is horrible. Your page is super hard to read. Make some improvements there,” so, that’s pretty cool. It’s almost like an SEO for dummies for how to write a page.

We rely on it. I mean, a lot of the big SEO companies out there rely on it. It’s not like some secret trick or anything. It’s just the thing is awesome, and it helps you take a lot of the guesswork and the manual checklist out of it. That’s the other really big benefit that it has. They update it. It’s probably the most popular one, and it’s got a big development team behind it. Yeah. Can’t recommend it enough, and the price is great. It’s free, right? Well, that’s about it for this week. If you guys got any questions, kind of like this one here that we’re tackling … We brought it up. I forgot to mention the front side. People are always asking, “How do I submit my website to Google? They took away that add URL. What are some options?”

This is how we kind of know what’s important, what kind of help you guys need, what things you want to hear about, so feel free to reach out to us, Intrycks.com/Show. We’d love to know what you need help with and what you want to hear. Let’s get into our five star review of the week for this week. This week, we got another great five star review from RunDMC19, which is an awesome username.

Bob: Sweet.

Jesse: Probably one of the best we’ve had so far.

Bob: Oh, yeah.

Jesse: It goes on to say, “As a content producer, I really needed a podcast like this to help me sharpen my SEO on my website. Also, I appreciate the effort put in to make this relatable to anyone. Great job.” Thanks for the great five star review, RunDMC19. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re just two regular guys who do this for a living. We get a ton of questions, talk to a lot of people, and we’re just trying to help. So, hopefully you enjoy these episodes. If you ever want to reach out to us for some help, above and beyond what we’re talking about here, we’re always available for consultations or even just bend our ear for a minute. Go to Intrycks.com/Show, and you can reach out to us and anybody else. As far as iTunes reviews goes, you know we read one every week. We love to keep getting them from you guys. If you go to Intrycks.com/iTunes, that’ll tell you what you need to know, how to leave one on iTunes. We’d really appreciate it.

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