Guest Post by Mitrabhanu: We are starting this guide to help you with the use of Google Webmaster Tools and how can you use this tool to analyze and optimize the website for better performance.
Google Webmaster Central is a great place for webmasters and the most popular thing from webmaster central is the Google Webmaster Tools. This is a perfect place for the webmasters to analyze and improve the website performance. This tool also allow you to control the activity of Google bot over your website. You can control the crawling speed, target a specific geographic location and remove URLs from Google search index etc. The main features of this tool includes, Showing the page impressions, how much traffic the site gets from Google search, The best and worst performing keywords, the number of URLs indexed by Google, the crawling errors faced by Google bot, number of back-links achieved, internal links and so many things that you should know.
How to Use Google Webmaster Tools?
Its very simple to signup for a Google Webmaster Tools if you have a Google account. Your Gmail account is also a Google account. I am sure you have a Google account. If no, then create one. Its free and take very less time. The first requirement in Google Webmaster tools is the Google account and the 2nd one is to verify the website at Google Webmaster Tools. This is the topic we are going discuss in this first post of Google Webmaster Tools Guide.
How to Add Your Website to Google Webmaster Tool?
- Browse to Webmaster Tools ( www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ ).
- Sign in to the site using your Google account user name and password.
- The next page will be the Home page and you can add your website on this page.
- Click on the button “Add a site “. A small box will appear and enter the URL of the website you wish to add into Google Webmaster tools and click ” Continue ” button.
The next page will take you to the verification Processes. Follow the steps bellow to Verify your website at Google Webmaster Tools.
How to Verify Your Website at Google Webmaster Tools?
There are four different methods to verify your ownership of the added domain at Google Webmaster tools. This may makes the process little complex, but it is very important for Google to be sure about the owner of a website. It will not provide any data related to website traffic, top performing Keywords to anonymous So be sure that your data is safe and only you can access them after verifying the ownership process.
The four ways to prove your ownership at Google are :
- Adding a DNS record to your domain’s configuration.
- Linking your Google Analytics account.
- Uploading an HTML file to your server.
- Adding a meta tag to your site’s home page.
Verifying the website by adding a DNS record to your domain’s configuration.
Select this option if you have got any idea about DNS Records. This process is little technical, and you can complete this if you follow the instructions carefully.
Click on the Radio button “Add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration” Find the drop-down list given bellow to that page . You can find 8 domain name registrars list. If you had booked your domain using one of those registrars select that. You can find the step by step instructions to complete the processes. If you don’t see your registrar choose the option “Other”. This will show you the general ways to do this job. If you had purchased the domain using Google apps, your domain registrar will be “Godaddy” or ” eNom”.
After everything is done, click on the “Verify” button. Follow this link for any kind of help for this processes.
Verifying the website by Linking to your Google Analytics account
If you are using the Google Analytics service for your website you can use this option to very your domain ownership. However this option needs you to be the administrator of the Google Analytics account.When you choose this option and click on the “Verify” button, it will search the active Google analytics tracking code on the index page of the website and check that tracking code with your analytics account. If both matches and you are the administrator of that analytics account, You are done.
Verifying the website by Uploading an HTML file to your server
When you select the radio button given for the option “Upload an HTML file to your server”, You can see the instructions will be shown bellow that page. Follow those instruction and download the given HTML verification file. Upload that HTML file to the root of your website.Upon successful upload, click the “Verify” button.Now it will search and find that file on your website and you are done with the verification process.
Verifying the website by adding a meta tag to your site’s home page
Meta tags are used to communicate with Search Engines. And if you select the radio button to add a meta tag to your site’s home page in order to verify the ownership, then it will show you the meta tag. Just Copy that meta tag and paste it in the header section within the <head></head>tags.You need to get access to the header file or index file in order to do this job. After completing the above steps, click on the “Verify” button. Done.
Continued…