Search Engine Submissions in 2013

Search engine submissions have been on the downward trend since the early 2000′s. However, many people still utilize submission services to save time and increase exposure across the smaller search engines.
During the 90′s to early 2000′s, search engine submissions were the talk of the town and it seemed to be the fastest way to get a site indexed by the search engines.
These days, it’s a very different story. With the advancement of search engine technology, the time it takes to discover and index new web pages has drastically changed. Back in the days, it used to take weeks, if not months, to get a new site indexed in Google or Yahoo. But today, it can take as little as a few minutes to hours before a new page is indexed.
To understand the purpose of search engine submissions, one needs to understand what search engine indexing is. To be indexed by a search engine means that the search engine has crawled your web page and it has been added to the search engine’s database. Once indexed, links to your site may appear within the search results when someone runs a search for keywords related to your niche.
3 Ways a Website is Indexed by the Search Engines:

• You can submit your URL directly to the search engines.
• You can submit your URL to the search engines via a web program or software.
• You can let the search engines find your site.

In regards to the 3rd point, you may be wondering how in the world a search engine would find your site when you haven’t submitted it. Well, there’s 2 possible ways.
The first way is by crawling the web and discovering new links. If you happen to have gotten a link from a site and Google crawls it, there’s a good chance your site will get indexed fairly quickly.
The second way is more theory than hard truth. Some SEOs believe that when new domains are registered, the registrars share this public data with the search engines. A new domain registration would be the signal for a new website or just a domainer purchasing a new domain.
Either way, the search engines will crawl the domain and check to see if indeed there is a site there.
If you don’t mind submitting to one search engine at a time, you can visit each search engine individually and submit your URL.

• Submit to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1
• Submit to Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
• Submit to Yahoo: not necessary because Yahoo gets its search results from Bing.

If you prefer not to go through the tedious task of submitting one at a time, you can use a free search engine submission tool online. These web-based programs allow you to automatically submit to multiple search engines using a single submit form. Here’s our very own search engine submission tool.
If you’re in no rush to get your site found, you can just let the search engines find you naturally. Articles are like food for the search engines, so they love to find fresh and unique content.