Google Webmaster Tools is a program used to gather information about your site’s visibility on Google. With it you can:
- Learn how Google crawls your web pages and diagnose specific problems that Google is having accessing the site.
- Discover how many external links are pointing to your website from other websites.
- Learn more about your internal links by seeing how many links within your own site are pointing to other pages on your site.
- Learn what keywords Google is sending you traffic with and also where you rank for those keywords.
- Register your site’s XML sitemap with Google so that you can update Google when you post new material on your site.
Here’s how you add your WordPress site to Google Webmaster Tools:
1.) Login or create a Google webmaster account.
2) Click on the Add a site button and enter your site’s web address.
3) On the next page, you’ll be asked to verify that you own the site being added. For verification method, choose Meta tag and copy the code provided.
4) Login to your WordPress admin portal and click the Editor link in the left hand column under the Appearance tab.
5) In the navigation located on the left hand column, find and click the Header (header.php) link.
6) In the theme editor, look for </head> and paste the line or code you copied from Google Webmaster before it.
7) Click the blue Update File button and you have successfully added your site to Google Webmaster.
Once you have confirmed your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you should register an XML sitemap with them. If you don’t have an XML sitemap, visit my post on Creating an XML sitemap for your WordPress blog.
If you already have an XML sitemap, here’s how you can add it to Webmaster:
1) Choose the site in Webmaster that you want to add your sitemap to.
2) Click the Site configuration tab and select Sitemaps.
3) Click on the Submit a Sitemap button and enter the location of your sitemap into the box that appears.
Congratulations! You’ve just registered your site with Google.
