Google Webmaster Tools
Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account is very simple, and very crucial if you want to track your blog in the Google rankings. Submitting your site to Google also allows you to show Google exactly what pages you have by submitting your sitemap, but that will be discussed in another article. The information you receive when you sign up is crucial to calibrating your site to it’s fullest potential.
If you haven’t already, sign up for a Google account. Use this as your master account for all your blogging needs. With Google you can submit multiple sites to any of their services, so having a master account will be a very convenient thing for you.
Also if you’ve not downloaded Google XML Sitemaps Plugin you need to do so now. It is crucial that you submit your sitemap to Google so that every time you update your blog they will be directly notified. This greatly increased your chances of getting your blog indexed and ranked very quickly.
Once you have signed up for your master blogging account with Google, head over to their Google Webmaster Tools. Once you are at this screen it will ask you to simply sign in with your account, and that’s all you’ll have to do.
Next it will show you a screen such as this:
Google Webmaster Tools
Click on Add a Site
Google WebTools Add a Site
You’ll then be asked to verify that you own the site, and this is a pretty simple process. We suggest uploading an HTML file as editing your blogs templates could have terrible results if you mess anything up.
All you will need to do is log into your hosting account for your wordpress blog, go to file manager, and create a file named after whatever they have you name it. Make sure you do this in the root directory upon which your wordpress is installed.
Once verified you will be taken to the Google Webmaster Tools homepage
Google Webmaster Tools Home
Take some time to explore this area and find out what everything does. If your site is brand new you will likely not have any information available. This can take some time to get there – weeks. The more popular your site and the more people that visit, the more often to Google bots will crawl your page and update your information.
There is some great information in these tools. You can see how many pages of your site are indexed, which pages are indexed, if you have links that are broken, what your top search queries are, all of your backlinks, and much more.
As an example, if you know what your top search queries are you can choose which ones would be reasonable to try and rank for. If you find a keyword that you didn’t think of beforehand you can now target it and start building backlinks with that anchor text and perhaps put much better SEO on the page that has the keyword.
One thing you also MUST do is submit your sitemap to google, which we will be discussing in another post. Until then, see you later!
Filed under: Google
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