Imagine you are starting a new business and just published your website. After you launch and review your new site, you turn to search engines to see how it is ranking. You try multiple search engines—Google, Yahoo, and Bing—yet your website never shows up. Is your website not working?
The issue isn’t your site itself: it’s that search engines have no idea that it exists. It takes longer than a few minutes to build up SEO and the likelihood of the search engine automatically crawling and indexing your new site in such a small window of time is little to none. So, what do you do? How do you get your website to appear on search engines?
It’s an easy step, but one that many new website owners forget to complete: Search Engine Registration.
WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE REGISTRATION (SER)?
Search Engine Registration is the step of submitting your site to search engines to let them know that it exists. Registering your website then gives search engines the opportunity to “crawl” and index your website. This is what allows your website to begin appearing on search engines so that potential customers can discover it.
IS SEARCH ENGINE REGISTRATION AUTOMATIC OR MANUAL?
Search Engine Registration is both automatic and manual. However, there are important distinctions in the processes of each and the benefits of choosing manual registration over automatic registration.
Automatic Search Engine Registration
Essentially, automatic registration relies on search engines’ algorithms to find your website themselves. This can happen in a multitude of ways, including a backlink referencing your website. However, you never know how long it will take for the search engines to find this backlink (or your website in general), crawl your website, and then index your website in the search engine; this makes automatic SER an unwise choice for your business.
Manual Search Engine Registration
Manual SER, on the other hand, is much more efficient and has a higher likelihood of faster results. As soon as your website goes live, you can manually register the website with search engines to let them know that it exists (rather than rely on algorithms that can take weeks to find your site). Additionally, manual search engine registration allows you to update search engines as soon as you make changes to your website.
Understanding the Difference
To best understand the differences between automatic and manual search engine registration, let’s look at an example. Let’s say you own a bakery and registered your website to search engines when you first began your business. Now business is expanding. Instead of focusing solely on pastries, you decide to include cakes, as well. You are now trying to find customers to purchase your cakes. You add a new page to your website to reflect the added service. Although you used manual registration when you first launched your business and website, it can take some time before search engines crawl your website again to see that you added a cake service to your website. You could wait for search engines to automatically crawl your website again, but that may cause you to miss out on business opportunities.
As soon as you add this page to your site, you can register the change with search engines. Doing this will give you faster results on how your site and business offerings appear on search engines.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Search Engine Registration is important for a variety of reasons:
- Search Engine Registration gets search engines to notice your website
Without registering your website, it can take a long time—sometimes even weeks—for your site to get noticed by search engines. Don’t miss out on potential customers and revenue because you haven’t registered your site!
- Search Engine Registration notifies search engines of new website pages
Anytime you add a new page to your website, you will want to register it with search engines. This is an important step for getting these new pages listed on search engines, especially if they include new products, services, or keywords you want to rank for!
- Search Engine Registration optimizes your SEO
Search engines help drive organic traffic for your site and show top results based on a variety of factors, including keywords. Registering your site in search engines helps search engines “read” your pages, identify your keywords, and show results based on the target search term.
SER FAQs:
What is Web Crawling?
Web crawling (or just “crawling”) is the internet’s version of seeing how pages are connected, whether within the same website or within different websites.
To better understand web crawling, let’s look back to the bakery business example from earlier. The town’s website may list the bakery under local places to eat. If a search engine is crawling the town’s page for local places to eat and sees it connected to your website (via a backlink), they now see the two as connected and will “read” both websites.
Additionally, a search engine may crawl a website to see how different pages connect to each other. For the bakery website, the search engine may see that the home page links to pages for products and services, contact information, and more. The search engines will then “crawl” each of these pages that are linked from the home page, any additional internal website links on those pages, and any external links going to outside sites to see how they relate to each other.
Search engines use web crawling to provide relevant website information in search engines. This is why it is important to include think about SEO when doing Search Engine Registration!
Is Search Engine Registration the Same as Submitting a Sitemap?
No. A sitemap essentially tells search engines how your website’s pages are interconnected (and helps with crawling) but submitting a sitemap does not mean that you have registered your site with the search engines.
HOW TO GET STARTED WITH SER
As you can see, search engine registration is extremely important if you want to get your website noticed. Search engine registration also complements Google My Business, another important search engine tool that your business can utilize to attract more attention and customers.
Need help registering your business’ website on search engines, getting started with Google My Business, or improving your site’s SEO? Media Venue can help! With 100 years of combined experience in media services, we’re ready to help you with any digital media services you need, whether that’s content development, SEO, and more. Visit the Media Venue website or contact us at (502) 855-4783 to learn more about how Media Venue can help you succeed. Enhance your marketing investment with Media Venue!
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