Google Webmaster Tools - Part 1 - Setup

June 10th, 2008 - 5 Comments
Categories: Google Webmaster Tools

So this series of posts will be discussing how to use Google’s Webmaster Tools to your advantage. If you own a website and you want to rank well in Google, then using their Webmaster Tools is almost a requirement. Ok ok, maybe not a requirement, but it is definitely something that you should be using.

First off, if you don’t already have a Google account you can sign up for one here. Go ahead and fill out the required information, agree to their terms and create your account. Once you have your account created, you will want to visit their Webmaster Tools. Go ahead and sign in with the username and password that you registered your account with.

Dashboard

After signing in, you will arrive at a page referred to as the Dashboard. This page will list all the sites that register with Webmaster Tools. The Dashboard also lets you add another site to the list as well as giving some extra tools that may prove useful to you in the future. But for now, since we don’t have a site listed, we don’t need to worry about those tools.

To add your site, go ahead and type the domain name into the input field where it reads “Click here to add a site”. Now, before we click the Add site button, there is something that needs to be explained.

First, you need to decide how you want your domain name showing up in Google’s index. The index is displayed when you search for something on Google. You will notice that some sites are listed with the www. prefix and that some are listed without it. You need to decide whether you want your site to show up with the www. prefix or without it. Neither is better then the other in terms of SEO or anything like that, so just go ahead and pick one.

Why is this important you ask? Well because if you are interested in achieving a good PR with Google, then you will want all links to your site to point to whichever prefix you chose. Now, obviously you can’t choose exactly how somebody links to your site, whether or not they use the www. prefix, but there are things you can do to make all requests coming into your site direct to either the www. version or the one without the www. prefix. But that is a whole different subject and not related to this series.

This will also determine how URL’s appear in your sitemap. Now don’t worry if you don’t know what a sitemap is, it will be explained later on in this series. Ok, so you’ve chosen which method you prefer to use, so go ahead and enter it into the input field and click Add site.

Overview

After entering your domain name, you will be taken to the Overview page of the Webmaster Tools. The Overview page lists some general options about your site such as when Googlebot last crawled your home page and the index status of your site. To the left you will notice 6 blue boxes labeled Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps and Tools. These boxes are used to navigate the Webmaster Tools and display different information about your site.

Verify Your Site

If your site is completely new to Webmaster Tools, Google requires that you show proof that you actually own the domain name or site that you are trying to gather more information from. You should notice a yellow box on the screen asking you to verify your site. Go ahead and click on the link inside the yellow box.

You should be taken to a page where you can select your verification method. You have 2 options here. You can choose to insert a <meta> tag inside of your <head> tag on your site or you can choose to upload a file to your server.

For the sake of keeping this simple, we are just going to go with uploading a file to your server. Now, if you don’t know how to upload a file to your site, you may need to contact your web host and ask them how to do it or if they can do it for you. Most web hosts offer a file management tool for your server and they may just point you to that. If you need more help on uploading a file to your server, don’t be afraid to leave a comment asking for more help or send me an email and I will do what I can to help.

Ok, so since we are uploading a file to our site, we are going to want to choose the Upload an HTML file in the dropdown box. Upon selecting this option, text will show up below the box asking you to create a file starting with google followed by letters and numbers. Below this are the steps you need to do in order to verify your site. Go ahead and create the file with the name that Google provided you. Once you have created this file, upload it to the main folder of your site. After uploading the file, you can click the blue link located in Step 2 to make sure that the file is accessible and readable.

If you can navigate successfully to the file, you are ready to verify your site. Go ahead and click Verify. Google will check whether or not it can access the file and either tell you that your site is verified or it will give you an error explaining as to why it could not access your file.

Upon successful verification of your site, you will be taken back to the Overview page. You should see a box with a blue border indicating the verification. You can now navigate to the different pages located on the left hand side of the screen. If you just verified your site, there will be no data to report as Googlebot has not had time to crawl your site. I would wait a day or two to give Googlebot some time to crawl your site. Even then, it isn’t guaranteed that information will be available once your site is crawled. You should be able to see some information within 4 days of verifying your site.

This concludes Part 1 of the Google Webmaster Tools series. Thanks for checking it out and be sure to keep an eye out for Part 2 tomorrow.

Go to Part 2

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