Why tell search engines about your site?
Getting listed on Google and the other search engines is one of the most effective ways to bring visitors to your site. Free (“organic”) search traffic is still the most valuable traffic there is, and search engines remain among the most trusted ways people find information.
Search engines don’t really rely on you submitting your site. They mainly find pages by crawling: programs called bots, spiders or crawlers keep re-checking sites they already know about and follow links to anything new. Useful pages they find are added to their index — the giant catalogue they search when someone types a query.
So why register at all? Because it gets a brand-new site noticed far sooner, lets you send them your sitemap, and gives you free reports showing how people find you and what’s broken.
Where to register first
| Service | Why |
|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Google handles the vast majority of UK searches. This is the one that matters most — see our step-by-step Search Console guide. |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Bing’s index also feeds results on Yahoo and, in large part, DuckDuckGo. You can import your site straight from Google Search Console. |
| Google Business Profile | Only if customers visit you or you serve a local area. It puts you on Google Maps and in the local results box. (It used to be called Google My Business.) |
| IndexNow | Optional. Lets you ping Bing, Yandex and others the moment a page changes. Many hosts and plugins can do it for you. |
What you need ready
- A sitemap — a list of every page you want found. That’s step 7.
- A robots.txt file — rules for crawlers, and where your sitemap is. That’s step 8.
- Proof that you own the site. You’ll be asked to add a small file to your site, a meta tag to your home page, or a TXT record to your domain’s DNS.
- Pages worth finding. Each page should have its own title and description, and real content. See the on-page SEO checklist.
Fast, secure hosting helps here too: Google favours pages that load quickly over HTTPS. That’s one reason we host every site on OnPoint Hosts, where SSL is included on every plan.