Search Engine Submission: What Is It & How It Works

This guide will explain everything you need to know about search engine submission.

Below, you’ll find out what is search engine submission, how it works, why it’s important for SEO, and the different types you can use for indexing your website and its individual web pages.

You’ll also find a search engine submission list you can use for URL submission to help improve the ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your content.

If your goal is to get your website indexed and ranking higher on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, then this page will help you understand how search engine submission can aid in that process.

What Is Search Engine Submission?

Search engine submission is the process of submitting your website or individual URLs to search engines so they know those web pages exist. Search engine submission helps your domain and its content get indexed and ranked for relevant searches.

How Does Search Engine Submission Work

Search engine submission works by submitting a URL or domain to the search engine so it crawls the web page and indexes it in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some search engines accept an XML sitemap for automatic crawling instead of manual URL submissions.

Types of Search Engine Submission

• Manual Submission: This process includes manually submitting your site and URLs to the search engine to be crawled and indexed. See the “Search Engine Submission List” below for these types of sites.
• Sitemap Submission: This type of submission includes adding your website’s XML sitemap file to your Webmaster Tools account with the search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. (See this related guide on how to submit URL to Google using this method.)

Why Is Search Engine Submission Important?

Search engine submission is important because helps increase the visibility and rankings of your website in search results pages of the major search engines. Submitting your domain and its URLs informs search engines like Google and Bing that you content exists and should be indexed for their users.

Search Engine Submission List

There are many search engine submissions services you can use to index your website and its URLs. As mentioned before, some search engines allow manual submission while others require an XML sitemap for automatic crawling.

The list below includes the top search engine submission sites. See this related guide for more information and links to these free web submission sites.

• FreeWebSubmission.com (manual)
• Active Search Results (manual)
• Buildwebsite4U (manual)
• Entire Web (manual)
• Exact Seek (manual)
• Gigablast (manual)
• Infotiger (manual)
• Scrubtheweb (manual)
• Submit Express (manual)
• Web Squash (manual)
• Google Search Console (XML sitemap)
• Bing Webmaster Tools (XML sitemap)
• Yandex (XML sitemap)
• Baidu (XML sitemap)
• Yahoo (Free through Bing Webmaster Tools)
• AOL (Free through Bing Webmaster Tools)
• DuckDuckGo (No submission is needed; Crawls the web)

Is Search Engine Submission Necessary?

Search engine submission is not necessary to have your website or its URLs indexed in the major search engines. You can get away without manual search engine submissions by having a sitemap listed on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.

Also, major search engines actively crawl the World Wide Web of new web pages to index. Therefore, these search engine spiders (also called web crawlers) will eventually find your domain and its content if it’s being linked to by other resources on the Internet and properly linked to internally on the site.

The top alternatives to search engine submission include:

• Getting incoming links from other websites to the website’s homepage and individual URLs. (See this related guide with free backlink sites.)
• Adding links to your web pages through social media platforms like Twitter, which provide real-time API access to Google to find, crawl, and index tweets with links embedded in them. (See this related guide on social media link building.)
• Submitting an XML sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
• Creating social bookmarks for target URLs.
• Submitting a website to web directories that are crawled by search engines. (See this related directory submission sites list.)
• Syndicating content to article directories. (See this related page with a list of free article submission sites.)

Search Engine Submission Summary

I hope you enjoyed this guide on search engine submission.

As you discovered, this process includes submitting your website or individual URLs to search engines so they know those web pages exist and can index and rank them for relevant search queries. And there are two primary ways to do that: manual search engine submission and automatic submission through an XML sitemap.