How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines

After creating & customizing your site & publishing articles on it, it becomes quite important to submit your website to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc as they are major source of traffic for a site. You can’t drive much of visitors to your website without the help of Search Engines. So here I am going to tell you that how to about uploading your website to search engines.

Pre-requisites

It is assumed that you have gone through the earlier tutorials and/or know well about how to create your website with wordpress & also know well about customizing your wordpress site. If you landed here directly & new to it, please read the following tutorials first:

INSTALLING YOAST SEO PLUGIN

Firstly login to your wordpress dashboard.
Click Plugins > Add New > Search for Yoast SEO.
Now install the Yoast SEO plugin & activate it.
Locate Yoast SEO (or simple SEO) in the Dashboard.
There will be a lot of options. Locate Sitemap(s) & click on it.
It will open a page like www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml or something like it.
Keep this tab open.

SIGNING UP FOR GOOGLE WEBMASTERS and SUBMITTING SITE TO GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE

In a new tab search “Google Webmaster”. Open the 1^st
Signup will your Gmail account.
Submit your website address. It will ask you to verify your site.
Download the .html file that they provide you.
Now open your ftp client (e.g. Filezilla). If you do not have one, then download Filezilla from its official site. Alternatively you can install FireFTP in Mozilla Firefox.
In your ftp client, Put your ftp information. E.g. If you are using Myownfreehost.net, you may have an email from them that contains your website information.
In the Host name put yourwebsite.com
In the Username & Password fields put your username & password. Do not put anything in Port & click Connect.
Your Website files will open. Find htdocs (in myownfreehost.net) or public_html in any other hosting provider.
In the left panel search for the .html file that you just downloaded. Drag it to your htdocs or public_html folder.
After successful uploading, open the Google Webmaster panel in your browser & click verify. Wait till your site is verified.
You will be redirected to Console Home page.
In the right sidebar, click your website name.
Now in the left sidebar, click crawl & then sitemap.
In the sitemap page, click Add/Test a Sitemap.
Put the sitemap address (site-map.xml) after your site name by copying it from your wordpress tab. (from the address bar just copy the address after / & not the whole site address. It will be sitemap_index.xml
Click test sitemap. Refresh the page. If no errors are found then submit it
Thats all!
Additionally you may click the sitemap address that you got from Yoast SEO. You will find about 6 sitemaps (of posts, pages, categories, tags, media etc.)
Submit all of them & you are done
The same procedure goes will all other search engines.
Open Bing Webmaster & signup. Upload the verification file in the same folder in the same way & click “verify” & submit all the sitemaps to it.
After that just wait & watch.