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If you are an established blogger, your site is probably already ranking in all the main search engines. But if you have a new site and don’t have many external links that point to your site, submitting your site to the main search engines can help your visibility and your ranking.

Not sure if the different search engines are already indexing your content? Check what information different search engines have about your site going to each of the leading search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) and typing your website name to see what comes back. In Google, you can type “site: site name”. For example: “site:marinagallego.com”, and this will list the pages from your site that Google has indexed. If your website is not listed, you can submit your site to all the major search engines for free. To do this, you need to follow a few simple steps described below:

Step 1 – Install Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a free WP plugin that provides tools to help you improve your search engine ranking. You can find step-by-step installation and configuration instructions here.

Setp2 – Go to Webmaster tools in Yoast SEO

In the WP Dashboard, go to YSEO> General and choose the Webmaster Tools tab:

You can click on each one of the above links and follow the instructions to verify your website with Baidu, Google, Bing and Yandex. Yahoo is powered by Bing, so verifying your website with Bing means you also verify it with Yahoo at the same time.

Step 3 – Follow instructions to submit to each search engine

Follow the detailed instructions below to submit to each search engine.

Submit to Google

To be able to verify your website with Google you need a Google account. If you don’t have one, you can create a free account here.

The same Google account is valid for all Google services, so you only need one account to use Google Console, Google Analytics, etc.

Once you have a Google account:

1 – Follow the Google verification link in the Webmaster Tools tab above.

2 – Log in to your Google account. You will be re-directed to the Verification screen below:

3 – Choose “HTML tag”.

4 – Copy the metatag that appears in blue above (the blanked area shows the ID number that will ID your site in Yoast. You can copy either that number only or the full metatag and Yoast will remove the “unwanted” part.). Leave this window open as you will need to come back to it.

5 – Go back to your site and paste the metatag in the Google text box in the Webmaster Tool’s dialog.

6 – Click on “Save changes”.

7 – Go back again to the Google verification window, and click “Verify”.

8 – You will get a confirmation window showing that your website has now been verified.

You can now access your website details in Google Search Console, which provides information about what content within your site is indexed, search statistics, errors, etc.

Submit to Bing

1 – Follow the link in Webmaster Tools

2 – Login to Bing (you can select to use the same credentials used for your Google account, for example).

3 – In the “Add a Site” page, enter your URL. You can also upload a sitemap now:

4 – In the verification screen, use option 2 and copy the meta tag. Don’t close this window as you will need to come back to it later.

5 – Go back to Yoast Webmaster Tools and paste the metatag from Bing into the text box.

6 – Save changes.

7 – Go back to Bing and click “Verify”.

8 – You will get a confirmation screen showing that your site has been verified.

You now have access to Bing Webmaster tools, which provide you information about which pages have appeared on searches in Bing, how many clicks, which pages are indexed, any errors, etc.

Submit to Yahoo

There is no need to submit your site to Yahoo once you’ve submitted it to Bing as Yahoo is powered by Bing.

Submit to Yandex

1 – Follow the link in Webmaster Tools

2 – Login to Yandex or create an account if you don’t have one (you can select to use the same credentials used for your Google account, for example).

3 – In the “Add a Site” page, enter your URL.

4 – In the verification screen, use option 2 and copy the meta tag. Don’t close this window, as you will need to come back to it later.

5 – Go back to Yoast Webmaster Tools and paste the metatag from Yandex into the text box.

6 – Save changes.

7 – Go back to Yandex and click “Check”.

8 – You will get a confirmation screen showing that your site has been verified.

You now have access to Yandex Webmaster tools, which provides statistics about your site’s performance in Yandex and it also highlights any errors or problems.

Yoast SEO also has a  link to submit your site to Baidou. This is a Chinese search engine in Chinese, if your site is in Chinese then you can follow a similar process to submit your site to Baidou.

To allow search engines to crawl and index your content, you need to label all your content clearly. For example, name images and provide alt text. You can also provide transcripts for video and audio content. You can find some guidance from Google on how to make sure your images and videos are indexable here.

You can also submit your sitemap to these search engines through the different webmaster tools.

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