Word Count: ~1900 · Reading Time: 10 minutes

Announcing Your Website’s Existence

You built a great shop in an unknown alley — now it is time to put up a sign on the main street

Note to the Reader: This article stands alone and applies to any active website. If you want to understand how to build the website you are announcing here, review our previous articles in this series starting with: Your First Step: Launching Your Website on WordPress.

Imagine opening a great restaurant in a quiet alley. The food is excellent and the decor is beautiful, but there is no sign on the main street, no location on Google Maps, and no one told anyone about it. People will walk right past the alley without knowing you exist. Your website on the internet is in a similar situation until you tell search engines it exists. In this article from Zy Yazan Platform, we will learn how to submit your website to Google, Bing, and other search engines, and how to configure the basics that make your website discoverable.

How Search Engines Find You — The Spiders That Crawl the Web

Before opening any tool, we need a simple understanding of how it works: Google sends software programs called “spiders” or “crawlers.” These programs travel the internet constantly to read website pages and add them to Google’s massive index. When someone searches for something, Google does not search the live internet — it searches the index it built previously.

The problem is that the crawler will not find your new website easily if no links point to it from another site. This is why Google Search Console exists. It lets you submit your website to Google directly instead of waiting for a crawler to find it by accident.

Step One — Connecting Your Website to Google Search Console

Google Search Console is completely free. You only need a standard Google account. Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in.

Adding Your Website — Two Methods

You will find two options to add your website. The first is “Domain”: This covers the entire website with all its versions (http, https, etc.). This is the best option but requires verification via DNS, which is slightly technical. The second is “URL Prefix”: You enter the full link of your website directly. This is the easiest option for beginners.

Ownership Verification — Three Methods

Google must confirm that you actually own the website before showing you its data. It offers several verification methods, and these are the simplest:

Method	How It Works	Best Suited For
HTML File	Upload a small file to your website’s root directory	Self-hosted websites
Meta Tag	Add a line of code into the head section of your page	WordPress via an SEO plugin
Google Analytics	If Analytics is already connected to your site	Anyone already using Analytics

If you use WordPress: The easiest method is installing the Yoast SEO or Rank Math plugin. They allow you to enter the verification code directly from the dashboard without touching any files.

Submitting a Sitemap

After verification, the most important step is submitting a Sitemap. This is an XML file that contains a list of all pages on your website. The crawler uses it as a guide to find everything you write instead of searching randomly.

If you are on WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math, the sitemap is generated automatically at a link like:

https://zyyazan.sy/sitemap.xml

Enter this link in the “Sitemaps” section inside Search Console and click “Submit.” From now on, Google knows where to find your new content as soon as it is published.

Step Two — Bing and Yandex: Do Not Ignore Them

Google is not the only search engine in the world, and your readers do not all search on Google. Bing powers Microsoft Copilot searches and is widely used in Europe and North America. Yandex is the most used engine in Russia and has a notable presence in the Arab region through users from neighboring countries.

Connecting your site to Bing Webmaster Tools is free and works exactly like Google’s process: a Microsoft account, ownership verification, and sitemap submission. In our specialized SEO series, we have detailed articles about this:
Do Not Ignore Bing | Connecting Your Site to Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yandex and the Arabic-Speaking Audience | Is It Worth the Effort?

On-Page SEO Basics — What the Writer Does Manually

Connecting the site to search engines only announces its existence. To rank well in search results, you must optimize elements inside each page you write. This is called On-Page SEO. It is the part the writer controls directly without technical experience.

The Main Title (H1) — The Page Gateway

Each page must contain only one main title (H1). Google reads it as the most important sentence on the page and uses it to decide what the page is about. Place the keyword your reader searches for near the beginning of the title as much as possible.

Meta Description — Your Advertisement in Search Results

These are the two sentences that appear below your website link in Google search results. It does not affect your ranking directly, but it influences a person’s decision to click. Keep it descriptive and specific, between 150-160 characters.

Keywords — How Your Reader Thinks

A keyword is not a word you choose arbitrarily. It is the exact phrase your reader types into the search box when looking for your topic. The difference is important: you might title your article “Mobile Phone Guide,” but your reader searches for “how to make my website work on mobile.” Our specialized SEO series includes an article that explains this deeply: Keywords | How the Reader Thinks and How to Find Them.

Internal Links — Pathways Between House Rooms

When you link one article to another inside your website, you accomplish two things at once: you help the reader keep reading, and you help the Google crawler discover the rest of your pages. Every article you write should point to at least one other relevant article on your site.

SEO is not about manipulating algorithms — it is about translating your good content into a language the search engine understands. Poor content will not be saved by excellent SEO, and great content will find its way with reasonable SEO.

The robots.txt File — The Gatekeeper

The robots.txt file is a simple text file in your website’s root directory. It tells search engine crawlers which pages they are allowed to visit and which they are not. Think of it as a sign at a building entrance: “Access allowed to the first floor; the second floor is for employees only.”

A new website usually does not need edits to this file. The default configuration in WordPress is appropriate. However, a common mistake developers make is enabling the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option in WordPress settings (Reading) during development, then forgetting to uncheck it at launch. Make sure this option is disabled.

What to Expect — A Realistic Timeline

After connecting your site and submitting the sitemap, it will not appear in search results the next day. This is what usually happens:

Stage	Expected Duration	What Happens
First Crawl	Days — 1 week	Google visits the site and reads your pages
Indexing	1 — 2 weeks	Pages are added to the index and begin to appear
Initial Ranking	1 — 3 months	You start getting impressions for specific terms
Real Growth	6 months onward	Content accumulates and external links begin to form

This timeline is not meant to discourage you — it is preparation. Anyone who understands that SEO is a long-term investment rather than an immediate result keeps writing with motivation instead of getting frustrated after two weeks.

This Article Is an Introduction — SEO Is a World of Its Own

What we learned here is the minimum necessary for any new website: announcing its existence and setting up the basics. However, SEO is a much deeper topic. Keywords and content strategy, technical SEO for large sites, backlink building, and image or video SEO all deserve their own dedicated series.

We already have a comprehensive series on our platform that starts from scratch and takes you to an advanced level: What SEO Really Is | A Definition Without the Jargon is the correct starting point if you want to dive deeper. You will find the three pillars of SEO, keywords, and how to think like an SEO expert even if you are a blogger and not a developer.

The difference between a website discovered by people and one that remains hidden is not always content quality — often, it is simply that one owner told Google it exists and the other did not.

Article Summary and Next Step

We learned together that announcing your website’s existence starts with specific practical steps: connecting it to Google Search Console, submitting a sitemap, repeating the process with Bing, and setting up basic on-page SEO elements for every page. We also learned that results require patience and consistency rather than waiting passive. Your website is now on the right track to be found by those searching for what you write.

Recommended Next Step:

We announced the website’s existence — but do you know what happens behind the scenes when someone opens your link? Where does the data come from? Where is it stored? In the next article, we will uncover the backroom of the internet: Internet Backstage: How Web Servers Work. We will understand servers, IPs, and the Domain Name System (DNS) without requiring a technical background.