Google Webmaster Tools is one of the most powerful free toolkits at your disposal for making sure Google can crawl your website properly.
In order to use Google Webmaster tools for your website, you need to verify it with Google to prove that you own the website.
There are two ways to do this:
- Uploading a special file to your website
- Adding a Meta Tag to your website.
With WordPress, it can be confusing how to do this. This video shows you how to verify your WordPress Website in Google Webmaster Tools using the Meta Tag method.
Once your site is verified, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to do all sorts of diagnostics on your site. For example:
- Submit an XML sitemap for your site (I use this WordPress Plugin to automatically update my XML sitemap)
- Discover any problems Google might have crawling your site
- Discover any duplicate content issues on your site
- See what keywords people are using to find you
- See what sites are linking to your website
- Check your Page Load Speed
- And a TON more.
Trust me, this is an indispensable tool and you’ll want to set it up for your website.
Update: Google has added a third and easier verification method now. If you already have Google Analytics installed on your site, Google Webmaster Tools can use it to verify your site – no need for meta tags or file uploads!
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Is it possible to do this if you site is set to “privacy” while you are building, or should you wait for the site to be “live”?
@Eileen – it should work when you have WordPress Privacy settings turned on. All that will do is tell Google not to crawl the site. But the Google Webmaster Tools should still verify.
Don,
No question for you , I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to make this blog and make your videos. Your information has helped me clear some of the fog from trying to build my first site using Wordpress.
You seem like a person who genuinely wants to help others and it comes across in your videos and your responses to people who have questions for you.
I wish you success in your endeavours!
Thank you a.g. – you just made my day!
thanks for the straight forward advice, much appreciated!
Very helpful. It only took me 5 minutes to verify my site!! Thanks.
your tutorials have really helped me build my website – i am a novice at this stuff and its totally awesome that you and a few others have posted these tutorials in a manner that any reasonablly intelligent person with some patience and time and figure out how to build a serviceable and attractive website. I particuarly apprieciate your post about optimization in google which is the whole reason I rebuilt my front page website.
thanks for the information on Google webmaster tool. Very useful tool for seeing user trends.
Dan,
Your information is excellent, even more impressive was your demonstation. Your video and its effectivness exemplifies the importance and power of SHOWING rather than TELLING. You don’t talk, you educate!
I still wonder this. If all proper seo elements and various protocols are followed to fulfill Google’s SE requirements, are websites built on Wordpress at a disadvantage for being crawled and indexed and ranked? Does Google practice “equal opportunity?”
@Andy, @Mike, @barbara, @Capresso – my pleasure and thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment for me!
@Candace – Thank you! I don’t see WordPress sites being at a disadvantage at all. If done right, you can set it up for great SEO fundamentals. And you can easily update your site with fresh new content, which gets more attention from Google’s crawlers. So I’ve seen WP be an advantage over static sites.
This video was great and I understand it better. The problem i’m having is finding the “Editor” under “Appearance”. I have “Edit CSS” but it’s different. I can only view that stylesheet and not edit it. Any suggestions?
Don – very helpful video for those of us still finding our feet with Wordpress.
Cheers
Graham
Don:
Very helpful and easy. Now I just need to get how to set up SEO on the dashboard properly. Let me say that Thomas has been very helpful with my many questions. Expand2Web made my life so much easier. I have people asking about expand after viewing what I have done. Your video’s are great.
Thanks
Bruce Sullivan
@JJ – So when you are logged into your WordPress Admin, you will see Editor when you expand the Appearance section on the right.
@Graham – thank you!
@Bruce Sullivan – Thank you Bruce! For SEO, this video shows the SEO features of the SmallBiz WordPress Theme.
Great content, thanks for the video!
Ciao, finalmente un sito che mi ha aiutato ad effettuare una manovra importante per la mia attività. Un caloroso grazie.
Thank’s for all.
Antonio Bellucci
Thanks for sharing this information with us, I was searching for how to verify wordpress website on Google webmasters tools.
Thanks , I hope it may work for me.
Hi Don thanks for the video. I am having trouble with the meta tag way of verifying my wordpress site. My theme is Gandhi 1.2 by Techblissonline Dot Com and when I put the meta code in the Header section just below the head section then I hit update the page goes blank, so it will not hold the code, can not update page. Do you have any ideas? Here is my site http://shoppingchefjohn.com/wp-admin/theme-editor.php?file=/themes/gandhi/header.php&theme=Gandhi&dir=theme
Don I have tried everything but can not get verifying to work using meta tag.
@John, It looks like you have a lot of plugins installed that place code in the
section of your site. You might try disabling those plugins, verifying and then re-enabling them once you are verified.Another path – if you have FTP access to your site, you can just use the file upload method to verify your site with Google Webmaster tools.
Thanks Don, I tried to disable my plug ins but still when I hit the update button my page goes blank.
John, what about the FTP method. Do you have FTP access to your site?
Sorry I don’t know what that is.
I have tried the Link to your Google Analytics account, but that does not work either.
Thanks for the video, very useful tutorial.
Hi Don,
I have trying to find an answer to this question and hope you can answer it here.
Ok, here’s the scenario.
I already have a website that is not using wordpress…but want to install a wordpress blog to the http://www.mysite.com/blog subdomain.
Now, do I need to verify both the http://www.mysite.com and the http://www.mysite.com/blog domain?
Also, do I I have to submit separate sitemap.xml files to the http://www.mysite.com and the http://www.mysite.com/blog domains?
Hi Pete – great question.
You only need to verify the site once, blog is just a subfolder of your site. Google Webmaster tools just considers it a website; it doesn’t care that part of it is being generated by WordPress and part of it is static files.
You can do the sitemap all in one file – in fact the WordPress XML Sitemaps plugin automatically generates a sitemap for all of your WordPress posts and pages, updates it dynamically, and allows you to enter in files that are outside of WordPress as well. So you can just submit that sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and you will be all set!
Thanks for the prompt response Don!
Now, what if I don’t want to use the wordpress XML sitemaps plugin? Can I use a tool like XML-sitemaps.com to create a map file for all my pages and blog posts if I put the map file in the root directory?
THanks again!
Sure. But you’ll have to run it again every time you publish a new blog post or add a new page.
Great information.. straight forward and easy to understand.
Thanks
this video has saved my life!!!!!
ive spent hours trying to get my site verified and this video sorted me out in seconds.
thank you so much and keep up the great work.
Very informative and well produced.
Thanks for your efforts.
Ron
@Carolyn, richard, Ron – thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to drop me a comment. It means a lot!
Hi Don,
Presume a Wordpress site is verified by Google.
Regarding the Wordpress XML sitemap plugin that enables automated updates for finding and indexing new content on a blog via search engine spiders: does this plugin work for Wordpress blogs only? Or, does this cool tool work with Wordpress websites and their individual pages, helping them get crawled, too? And, if it applies to websites as well as blogs, shouldn’t we submit XML sitemaps for every page of the website so that no page goes unnoticed by our creepy, sweet arachnids? I know of companies that have converted websites into blogs in order to utilize the Wordpress XML sitemap plugin capability. Is that necessary?
Thanks,
Candace
@Candace – As long as it is a WordPress site (blog or website, no difference) then that plugin will update your XML sitemap whenever you publish a new Page or Post. Let me know if I mis-understood your question.
Hi Don,
You understood and answered my question. It sounds like the xml sitemap automated-update feature for crawling and indexing fresh content applies to a Wordpress website page as well as a new post on a Wordpress blog. Let no new website page go unfound!
Thanks,
Candace
Don,
I’m a little unclear with the whole submitting your site thing.
Is verifying your site with Google and formally submitting your site to Google the same thing?
Do all search engines automatically start indexing/crawling your site after you publish pages/posts or do you have to formally submit your site to each SE?
@a.g. – Google will eventually find your site even if you don’t submit it, as long as some other site Google crawls links to yours.
The reason you want to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is to get Google to crawl it as quickly as possible, and so that you can access the troubleshooting tools available in GWT. It will tell you all sorts of things about how Google views your website, and it super helpful when you need to figure out why a page on your site isn’t found, or if you have duplicate content problems, broken links, etc…
Thanks for the quick reply , Don!
What about the other SE’s like Bing and Yahoo?
After you verify and optimize your site with GWT will they also start indexing my site?
Good question a.g.
You should also submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/
And Yahoo Site Explorer (which may be going away now that Bing is handling Yahoo’s search engine) http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/webmaster-01.html
Thanks Don,
As usual, your help is timely and appreciated.
I send you positive karma from Toronto!
Don,
Quick SEO question…
Do you know if it is ok to use a slash in your title tag?
Let’s say for example you’re reviewing a video game so your title tag reads “Review of game for Xbox/Playstation” Will the slash cause issues for the SE bots?
or is it just better to avoid symbols in the title tag altogether and just use “And” or “Or”
Hi a.g. – it is ok to use / in your title tags, but I avoid it since the / can be used for other purposes by parsers.
Hi,
First of all, thank you very much for this simple and clear instruction of having your site verified by google. I have taken so many hours last night trying to figure this out and complete no clue what to do until I find your site this morning, thank goodness.
Btw, for some reason, my site was shown as verified in webmaster tools but it is actually not verified for I have not done anything, like copying the meta taga as shown above, for has it verified. I can’t see the verification button anymore.
I tried to delate the URL from the webmaster tool and recreate a new site, but too bad, it recognises the URL and indicated as verified again. How can it be verified when I type in google search of my whole website name, and it shows as domain name available !!!??
Please help, what should I do next?
Hi Jean,
Does Google Webmaster Tools show you the information about your site? If it is already verified then you are all set and should be able to get your stats. If not, I would need to see more (like a screen shot) to determine what is going on.
Google offers the best and free SEO tools online that are very useful esp in tracking down your SEO efforts. Also add Google analytics to track down traffic and visits to your website.
This was EXTREMELY helpful, I tried to do this about a year ago but gave up. Good thing I came across your video and got it done, finally. Thanks so much Don!
thank you so much for this video. i`ve been going out of my mind trying to figure out how to do this. if only google had the sence to realise that some people are new to all this. (like you have) the world would be a better place.
thank you.
Richard
it is a very helpful video tutorial,I was looking for, but
I have a wordpress blog. not site. May I verify it and submit sitemap for this??
I have no editor!!!!!
plz help me.
@shabnam, good question – yes you can verify your WordPress.com blog with Google Webmaster tools. Here’s how you do it:
1) In Google Webmaster Tools, choose the “file upload” method for verifying your site.
2) Create a new “Page” in your WordPress blog (not a “post)
3) In the Title of that Page, paste the html filename that Google gives you (e.g. google4f645e3adsdab47g3a41z.html)
4) Publish it
5) Go back to Google Webmaster Tools and verify your blog
6) Once verified, you can delete the page
hi shabnam,
I to have a wordpress blogg. the instructions on the video will work fine for your blog. If you need an editor for your blog i recommend installing the fckeditor plugin. ITS FREE! just copy and paste this address.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fckeditor-for-wordpress-plugin/
hope this helps
Thanks for the information. The video was very helpful, and I greatly appreciate the help from you and others that have helped me launch my blog on movies and music. Thanks.
J
Hi there Don, lovely video.
I was trying to follow the instructions you gave to ‘shabnam’ but just cannot verify my site.
I have a free wordpress blog, with a domain name attached, and have tried to do as you suggested with shabnam, however I’m still having a problem verifying the blog, getting the message “Verification failed. Your verification file has the wrong content. ”
At the end of this message is the code that Google webmaster finds.
Is this anything to do with it being a free blog hosted by wordpress? Does this make any difference?
Do I need to add anything to google’s verification code, such as woofandwalks.com ?
Thanks very much for any help you can offer.
http://www.woofandwalks.com
Click here for http://www.woofandwalks.wordpress.com
Thanks for reply. It was helpful……
Thnx now my site is verified……………………….
Thankuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu very very very much……………..
thanks so much this helpful….. and my site is verified
I’ve tried every suggestion and I receive this error:
Verification failed. Your site’s home page returns a status of 404 (Not found) instead of 200 (OK).
What else can I do?
Hi Lisa,
404 means that is cannot find the page – what is the URL of the site you are trying to verify?
thanks a lot. very helpful/straightforward video, I don’t think I would have worked it out without your help.
thanks
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