Last Updated on 03/03/2022 by Arnie
The simple answer is YES – search engine submission is necessary. The majority of search engines nowadays (most notably Google) crawl and index pages by following links. Using that logic, a single inbound link from any already-indexed page will identify your page to the engine. Subsequently, if that page links to other pages within your site, they will also be indexed… and so on.
For this reason, inbound linking is very important. In fact, acquiring back-links may be the most important of SEO. In theory though, a website owner shouldn’t have to ’scout’ or ‘hunt’ for links. If the presented content is of interest, useful, and/or important, there is a natural tendency among web users to link to information. This is the basis for the Google PageRank algorithm.
With all due respect, submitting your site to the search engines is extremely important and it only entails about 5 minutes of added work assuming you only submit to the big guys. And once is enough… you don’t need to submit your site more than once. It does help or get your site crawled any quicker or more often.
It should be noted that submitting your site to Google and Bing, and many others doesn’t cost a fee. Many SEO companies assert that you need to pay to be indexed. This isn’t the case and I would stay away from these companies. They are money hungry and aren’t looking out for your best interest.
To submit your website to Google, you can either add an updated sitemap to your Google account, or submit an indexing request for the desired URL through Fetch as Google. Both processes require site owners to register with Google Search Console. Go to URL Submission Tool.
Bing recommends using the URL Submission to get their web content indexed as soon as they published or updated it online. Webmasters can Submit URLs to Bing programmatically through the Submit URL API or using the URL Submission feature in Bing Webmasters Tools.
However WordPress has an built-in sitemap feature
Until August 2020, WordPress didn’t have built-in sitemaps. However in WordPress 5.5, they released a basic XML sitemap feature.
This allows you to automatically create an XML sitemap in WordPress without using a plugin. You can simply add wp-sitemap.xml at the end of your domain name, and WordPress will show you the default XML sitemap.
This XML sitemap feature was added to WordPress to make sure that any new WordPress website does not miss out on the SEO benefits of an XML sitemap.
However, it is not very flexible, and you cannot easily control what to add or remove from your XML sitemaps.
Luckily, almost all top WordPress plugins come with their own sitemap functionality. These sitemaps are better, and you can control which content to remove or exclude from your WordPress XML sitemaps. In our next two posts we will list the favourite sitemap plugins for WordPress and now to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing.
