Search Engines e.g. Google and Bing, use web crawlers (also known as spiders, or spiderbots). This is software technology that crawls the entire World Wide Web daily, finding new hyperlinks and indexing new content. When search engines index website content, it means that content gets added to their gigantic database.

If a website has not been indexed by a Search Engine (SE), it won’t rank on organic searches, because they are unaware of the site’s existence. The SE bots will eventually crawl your website and index it, however, this can take weeks. Every new website owner is excited to get their website live asap and they want it to be seen in search results. Manually submitting a website to a Search Engine can speed up the process.

Follow our simple steps below to submit your website for indexing on Google & Bing:

Add your website to Google Search Console

Step 1: Sign up for Google Search Console here. It’s free.
Step 2: Go to the URL inspection tool.
Step 3: Copy and paste your website URL in the search bar.
Step 4: Click the “Request indexing button”.

Add your website to Bing Webmaster Tools

Step 1: Open a Bing Webmaster Tools account here. It’s free.
Step 2: Add your site.
Step 3: Verify ownership by selecting the best option from those listed.
Step 4: Once verified a green checkmark will appear.
Step 5: Navigate to the URL Submission feature and click “Submit URLs”.
Step 6: Add every URL (for each page URL address) of your website (one per line) and Click Submit.

TIP: Every time you add a new URL to your website i.e. a new blog article, or new product, follow the above steps to ensure the link is indexed quicker.

What about the other search engines?

In South Africa Google has about 94.51% of the search market share, with Bing coming in at 4.42% and Yahoo at 0.42%.

Adding your website to the top two will make all the difference. But don’t worry you’ll get indexed by all search engines as time goes on.

It is important to note that indexing and ranking are two different things. Once your website is indexed successfully you can start the slow and on-going process of building your website’s SEO for better ranking. Need help with this? Follow these on-page SEO tips to get started with this journey.