Advice on Wordpress needed

[AlwaysOneMissing]

I am building my website on Wordpress.com and have virtually completed it. I would like to make my site visible to search engines, and I believe there is a way of doing this through your Wordpress account, but I had a good look last night and just can't see how to do it!
Does anybody know?
TIA :)

Hi there

Exciting you are moving forward always!

You can install "All in one SEO pack" widget which provides a place where you put your SEO words etc on each page. It seems to work ok for me. It is free.

A SEO godess may well have a better suggestion.

HTH

First sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and link your accounts. Pop your website URL into both of these and you will receive a unique code to paste into your website to prove you own them.

Then, in your Wordpress plugins install Yoast SEO (or All in One SEO Pack as someone mentioned). In the Dashboard part of Yoast, you can paste the code Google Webmaster Tools gave you and the two will link up together.

It is more complicated than this but if you follow these steps, and read the instructions from Yoast and Google as you go, you will understand what you are doing and that your site will start to be indexed by Google pretty soon.

No idea about other search engines as I only bother with Google.

Thanks so much for the responses, I will take the time to go through these when I get the chance. Does it matter that my site is with Wordpress.com rather that Wordpress.org?

MrsMargo yes, I have had (another!!) change in circs, and for now can concentrate a bit on my business. I have very few hours to put into it though so I'm not putting too much pressure on myself to earn anything much!

Use bing too. Bing is microsoft's answer to google and given they power Facebook - ignore it at your peril!

Great tip Dolmites, I didn't know that about Bing, but will definitely submit my site to them too. Thanks.

Hi there, sorry for highjacking the message... I read the posts and went to check if my website was indexed and came across this site ismysiteindexed.com/ and I would like to know if anyone in here has ever used this site before? TIA

It's spamming for low-quality backlinks - wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole - typing your website in there will likely harm its overall health, not improve it.

As has been said before, submit your sites yourself. It takes 20 minutes. No bullshit. No scams.

Wordpress.com will not let you install third party plugins. so use the tools they do provide, can not recall what they were but I do not think I did anything special to activate it. Google and other search engines will find content themselves.

Use headers and tags, plus categories to help search engines and humans find posts on particular topics.

ah, that's good to know, thank you very much for the advice and information DD and Nanny. It is already been submitted to Google but not sure if it was submitted to Bing or Yahoo. The site is not built in Wordpress so I am not sure what the procedure would be to submitting them... Not a very technical person here :)

Wordpress.com Publicize may help you to know what Wordpress.com does when you add a post, plus what options can be added such as publishing to Twitter.

Thank you very much for that Nannyn :)

Sorry if this is stating the obvious but also make sure you have unchecked the "Search Engine Visibility" in Settings-Reading as having this checked "discourages" search engines from indexing your site!

Yoast is excellent.