Submitting your website to search engines (Google and Bing)

Search engines usually find a new website by themselves, especially when other sites link to it. If you want it to happen faster and see how your site appears in the search results, submit your site to Google and Bing yourself. The old way of submitting a site through a simple form no longer exists: it now goes through the free webmaster tools of the search engines.

1. Google Search Console

1. Go to Google Search Console and sign in with a Google account.
2. Add your website as a Domain (for example yourdomain.com). Google will then ask you to add a TXT record to prove that the domain is yours.
3. Add that TXT record in My WebOké under My DNS, or in DirectAdmin under DNS Management. Then click Verify in Search Console. It can take a little while before the change is visible everywhere.
4. Submit your sitemap under Sitemaps, for example https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. WordPress creates a sitemap itself (/wp-sitemap.xml), and plugins such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math do so as well.
5. To have a single page picked up quickly, use URL inspection at the top and choose Request indexing.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in.
2. If your site is already in Google Search Console, you can import it with one click. Otherwise add it and verify ownership in the same way with a DNS record.
3. Submit your sitemap here as well. Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, among others, use Bing data (in part), so this also makes you easier to find there.

Good to know

• It can take days to weeks before your site appears in the search results. Submitting it speeds things up, but a top position is never guaranteed.
• Make sure your site does not block search engines. In WordPress, go to Settings > Reading: the option Discourage search engines from indexing this site must be unticked.
• Links from other websites, a clear title for each page and good, original content help most to be found.