We recommend that you move your website onto the live URL as soon as possible so it can be submitted to the different search engines. Once your website is submitted to search engines then you will start to see results in about 4 months, which is plenty of time to get your website finished.
The quickest and easiest way of submitting your website to search engines is to 'ping' the search engine with your website's sitemap. One of the great features of Hammerhead CMS is its ability automatically keep your website's sitemap up to date; a new sitemap is generated each time you refresh the site cache after making adding, changing or deleting content.
Your site map can be found here: http://<your_website address>/sitemap.xml
For example: http://www.yellowsubmarinedivers.com/sitemap.xml
The following sitemap submission URLs require you to add your sitemap address to the end after the = sign
Bing - http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=
Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
For example http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=http://www.yellowsubmarinedivers.com/sitemap.xml
Ask.com has officiallt retired their sitemap submission feature and will be relying on crawling websites instead.
For two other important directories you need to manually provide information about your website.
DMOZ - http://www.dmoz.org/help/submit.html
The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as DMOZ (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. ODP data powers the core directory services for many of the Web's largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, and Alexa, so by submitting your site to DMOZ you get listed in the directories of other search engines and portals without having to submit to each individually, which would otherwise be a time consuming task.
Baidu - http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html
Baidu is to China is what Google is to the rest of the world. Baidu has around 65% of the Chinese search market and so the predominant search engine for the Chinese market. Effectively, if you want to attract your customers from China your website needs to listed on Baidu.
There are other ways to submit sitemaps, such as downloadable and online tools.
These options submit your sitemap to different search engines, but they don't allow you to monitor when your site is indexed by the search engines and more importantly how your site is performing in terms of impressions (how many times your website appears on search engine results pages), and clicks (how many times your website is clicked in search engine results pages). To achieve this you need to set up Webmaster Tools accounts with Bing and Google. This is explained in the Submitting Your Website To Directories and Configuring Webmaster Tools document, which can be found on the Hammerhead CMS Resources page.
If you want even more information relating to the traffic your website is attracting then you need to use Google Analytics. A guide to setting up Google Analytics can also be found on the Hammerhead CMS Resources page.