How to get your site noticed and indexed by search engines!

Search Engine - Dall-E

 First, make sure to register for Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yandex Webmaster as the domain admin. There are some other search engine portals such as Baidu and Petal which might be worthwhile adding... but certainly not necessary. Also note that if you live outside of the Great Firewall of China, you might have difficulty signing up. 

Make sure to add a property for all your domains and subdomains as well as the http and https version of you site. Next, also add www. and the non-www version of your site. This way, you can ensure that all variants of your site are known to the search engine crawlers. 

You should also redirect to https whenever possible and chose either www or the non-www variant to be the standard/default going forward. You should also be able to indicate that in the search console of google, bing, yandex, etc. That should bring you to 4 different versions of your website (from 1). 

Google obviously is the largest search engine, While Bing is trailing, they also operate the backend for the Yahoo search engine... and it's managed in their same portal. Yandex is popular in Eastern Europe, while I have heard that DuckDuckGo uses Yandex and Bing as partners.. so getting your site on those webmaster portals won't hurt. Brave Search currently isn't letting webmasters submit links... 

Each site will require some form of confirmation that you do in fact own the domain name. Sometimes, they want you to add a DNS entry, add a meta tag to your html page, or upload a file to your domain with a long string of text... 

I prefer usually via the meta html tag or DNS record. Note that some of these cover the whole domain and others just count for the subdomain and even the current page. I know that google will remove your site form the console if you remove the verification method after being approved. 

Once you confirm ownership, make sure to get your sitemap file recognized. You should make it in your main directory like this:  example.com/sitemap.xml. Then on each webmaster portal, there will be a section to link to your sitemap. If you use blogger, they have some special sitemaps which are generally accepted too (as well as RSS Feeds):

example.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

If your site is static, and you don't want to have to manually add links to your sitemap... there are a few actions on github which might do the job such as this. 

Next, check your robots.txt file (should be in your main directory - example.com/robots.txt) and make sure it's not going to block the indexing bots from webpages or directories  you want to appear in search results. You can also reference your sitemap here! If you do not have a robots.txt file, now is the time to create one. 

Don't forget to add this to the end with your domain and sitemap link (everything in bold): 

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This allows the search engine web-crawlers easy access to your important pages! 

If you use images, make sure to add a descriptive alt tag which helps for both accessibility and SEO! 

Backlinks are also super important, it tells these search engines that your site is useful and reputable. Make sure to get your link on other sites legitimately, maybe by offering to guest post or if you have a profile... there might be a field to let you link to your site etc. 

For starters, try submitting your relevant links to subreddits, hackernews, indiehackers, pinterest boards, etc. 

Thank you for reading, please share the article and follow me on twitter for more resources and guides!