Once you have launched your blog, the next thing to look at would be the SEO aspect of your blog. One basic SEO task is to ensure that the top search engines are aware of your blog’s existence and are indexing your blog so that they can send traffic to your blog. .
It would not be enough just to submit your blog’s URL to the Google search engine alone even though they account for 2/3 of the total web searches. You must also submit your blog’s URL to the other top search engines like Yahoo (16%), Bing (13%), Ask.com (3.56%) and AOL.com (1.97%) where they account for the remaining 1/3 of the total web searches. (Source: Hitwise.com – 9/10/2010).
As for the other smaller search engines, you can ignore them as most of them rely on the top search engines for their search results.
Below are the links which you can use to submit your blog’s URL to the top 5 search engines:
Submit URL to Google.com:
Use this link to submit your blog’s URL to the Google’s index.
Submit URL to Yahoo.com:
Use this link to submit your blog’s URL to Yahoo
Submit URL to Bing.com:
To submit your site to Bing.com, you are required to sign up for a Bing Webmaster Tools account where you must have a hotmail account.
Submit URL to Ask.com:
Ask.com does not have the Webmaster tools unlike Google, Yahoo and Bing.
To submit your blog to Ask.com, type the following into your browser’s address bar:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.YOUR SITE’s URL.com/sitemap.xml
Note: Replace “YOUR SITE’s URL” with your blog’s URL.
Once your blog’s URL submission is successful, Ask.com will display the following confirmation screen:
Note: AOL.com uses Google for its organic search and you just need to submit your site to Google.com.
Once you have submitted your blog’s URL to Google, Yahoo and Bing, these search engines will require you to do some verification as to whether the site belong to you.
The next step is to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin on your WordPress blog where this plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to understand your blog’s internal structure so they can index the same better.
In conclusion, these 5 top search engines make up more than 99% of the total web searches and it is therefore imperative that you must submit your blog’s URL to these search engines in order for your blog to be found by them.
