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.
Please rate my video and leave me comments below!
{ 86 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
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
← Previous Comments