Website Search Engine Submission: Why Law Firms Need it Now

Over 90 percent of web search traffic comes from just half a dozen major search engine companies. With so many people on the internet using the same tools to search, free website search engine submission has become very important for any lawyer looking to make sure that his or her website can be found easily online.

If you've never done website search engine submission before, you might be intimidated, but don't worry—this is actually one of the easiest tasks you can do to start your search engine marketing. We'll take it slowly in this guide and show you how to start with free website search engine submission, and what your next steps should be after it's done.

Indexing: Why Website Search Engine Submission Matters

So you've made your website, and you go to Google to search for it. What comes up? Not a thing! Why? Because of one word: indexing. Google constantly maintains an index of all of the pages the search engine links to. If you're not in the index, as far as Google—and the 2/3 of web searchers who use it—are concerned, you don't even really exist yet.

You can change all that in several different ways. Google has programs designed to follow all available links and see where they go. These programs, called “spiders” because they crawl on the web looking for links, can find you once you've accumulated some inbound links from other sites. But what if you don't want to wait for these crawlers to find your website? After all, doing that can take months, and you don't have that kind of time.

Instead of waiting to be indexed, you can do free website search engine submission. Website search engine submission gives you the sure knowledge that a search engine has received your site and will index it as quickly as possible, as long as it meets content guidelines.

Website Search Engine Submission: Google and Bing

The two biggest search engines—where you should definitely do a free website search engine submission—are Google and Bing. A few years ago, this article would have said “Google and Yahoo,” but today, Yahoo's search results are also served up by Microsoft's Bing search engine. These two search engines will only take ten minutes to make a website search engine submission to—and those two submissions will put your website into the searches used by over 80% of web users.

To start by putting your first free website search engine submission URL into Google, go to www.google.com/submityourcontent. When you go to this web page, you'll see a place for website search engine submission, and you should click there. By following the step by step instructions on the web page, you'll be able to do a free website search engine submission within minutes.

Bing's procedure works in much the same way, and will also give you guidance in case you've never done a website search engine submission before. Both of these websites also allow you to submit a site index in a specific format. If you want to submit a site index (which is a very good idea in addition to doing your free website search engine submission), you should make sure first that it is in the correct format—an incorrectly formatted site index will be rejected and won't give you any better search rankings.

Don't Expect Instant Results

If you expect for your free website search engine submission to start giving you new clients right away, your expectations may need to be toned down. Even after you do a website search engine submission, it still will take some time for your site to actually start appearing in the search results that normal web users are getting.

If you're not starting to see your website appear in searches after several weeks, you may want to inquire with a search engine to make sure that your submission was properly received and that it met all guidelines. If there has been a mistake and your site wasn't indexed, the mistake will generally be corrected promptly.

You will usually see faster increases to your search rankings if you submitted your site index in addition to your traditional website search engine submission. This is because site indices make it substantially easier for Google to look at all the different web pages on your site, not just your front page.

Beyond Website Search Engine Submission: Directory Links

Free website search engine submission is great, but without inbound links, it's likely that not many people will actually see the website that you've created. That's because Google and other search engines base your search engine rankings in large part on the number and quality level of the inbound links you are able to build.

If you want to start building high quality inbound links to help make your website search engine submission successful, you can start by putting your website into directories. Usually, the process for submitting your URL to a directory of websites is very similar to the process for free website search engine submission.

You should pay especially close attention to directories of other attorneys. These are contextual directories and will be more valuable for your search engine results than more general directories that are not selective about what kinds of websites they accept through their submissions process.

Updating Your Website Search Engine Submission

As your website changes and expands, you may find that you need a site redesign to keep pace with changes to search algorithms or just changing tastes. When you update your website, especially if you're updating the structure of the pages, you need to do a few things: you need to create redirects so that people coming to your old pages are directed to similar content on your newly designed website, and you need to do the free website search engine submission process again.

It may be effective to download a program online that helps you do free website search engine submission automatically. These programs are not penalized by any search engines, and offer a convenient solution for busy marketing professionals who want to do website search engine submission as quickly as possible.