Google Webmaster Tools for WordPress
November 5, 2007 · Print This Article
Google Webmaster Tools are free tools that help you do a lot of great things to help you site along; two of the most important being submitting your sitemap and specifying your prefered domain. The first thing to do is get a Google Webmaster Tools account.
Next, you’ll want to sign in to your account and add your url to the account.
Then you’ll want to verify that you’re the owner of the url. There’s two ways to do this: add a meta tag, or add an HTML file. Here’s how to add an HTML file for verification using WordPress:
Part 1 - Create a new template page
1. Open notepad or some other text editor
2. Paste the following code:
<?php /* Template Name: Verification*/ ?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Verification</title>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
3. Save the file as verification.php
4. Upload it into your WordPress theme folder
Why am I doing it this way? Well, you could just skip to part 2, but you don’t really want your Google page to be indexed, hence the noindex, nofollow commands on the page. Once you’ve set up the tempate, you’re ready for the verification process with Google.
Part 2 - Verify with Google
1. Sign in to your Google Webmaster Tools account
2. Click on ‘verify’ to the right of your url
3. Choose ‘Upload an HTML file’ from the dropdown
4. Copy the code they give you (starts with the word google and ends with .html)
5. Login to WordPress
6. Click ‘Write’ then ‘Page’
7. Paste the code from Google into the title area
8. On the right hand side, click on ‘page template’ and choose your verification template from part 1 from the dropdown options
9. Publish the page
10. Go back to Google Webmaster Tools page and click the url that says yourdomain.com/googlecode.html. The page should be totally blank.
11. If it looks good, click ‘verify’ and Google should immediately verify your ownership of the url
Submitting your Sitemap
Submitting you sitemap is pretty easy. If you don’t have a sitemap, I suggest you pick up the all-in-one SEO pack for WordPress from uberdose. Then follow these steps:
1. Sign in to Google Webmaster tools account or go to the dashboard if you’re already signed in
2. You’ll now see your url on the dashboard, click ‘add sitemap’
3. Choose ‘Add General Sitemap’ from the dropdown options
4. Enter your the url of your sitemap and click ‘add general sitemap’ (your sitemap url is /sitemap.xml if you are using the all-in-one SEO pack)
Now you can follow how Google is crawling your site and using your sitemap.
Specify Your Preferred Domain
Specifying your preferred domain helps Google index only one version of your site. I talked about another important step in this process, which is setting up a 301 redirect Which if you haven’t done. you should do now.
So now for adding your preferred domain.
1. From your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, click on your domain name
2. Now click on ‘tools’ on the bottom of the navigation bar on the left side of the screen
3. Click ‘Set preferred domain’ from the sub-menu that opens
4. Set your preferred domain
You’re all set. You’ve helped give Google some direction about how to index your site, which will help with your SEO efforst. Now you can sit back, drink an ice-cold lemonade and watch as Google indexes your pages.
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