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Google provides a suite of tools for analyzing your website. All of these tools are very easy to use with WordPress, and most are supported with helpful plugins. The benefits of using Google Webmaster Tools are many, here’s the top 3 benefits you need to know starting out:
- Free, Google Webmaster tools cost you only the time to learn how to use them.
- Very easy to setup when starting out.
- All your site information in one handy place.
The devil, of course, in the details, and when you’re ready to dig deep, check out the links below for more detailed information. For now, the most important things as a beginner with a new website is getting verified and getting your sitemap.xml indexed.
Let’s get going!
Once you get a few pages on your site, log into Google Webmaster Tools and follow the procedure for Google to verify your website. The easiest way is to create the suggested file on your computer desktop, upload the file, then verify. The other method of adding code into your meta tag structure is “cleaner,” but you have to understand a little code, and it’s not as maintainable. The file method ensures that Google will always something for verification, whereas using a specific file with meta tag requires keeping track of the file or files with that tag, and making sure Google loads them.
Once your site is verified, you can see the result by clicking on the details link to the right of the page, which will take you to a page like this:
Google Webmaster Tools Site Verification page
Next, submit your sitemap.xml file manually. You do have a sitemap plugin installed, right? Website In A Weekend recommends using Arne Brachold’s XML Sitemap plugin. If you haven’t installed it, do that now and come back. We’ll be here.
Once you have your sitemap.xml generated, submit the file to Google Webmaster Tools. It will will take a few minutes, usually no more than an hour for Google to retrieve your new sitemap.xml and display the results. Your initial results should look something like this:
Newly submitted Google sitemap.xml
Note there is only 12 links on this site, as it’s newly created, consisting of boilerplate such as contact page, FAQ, Terms & Conditions, etc. With so few results on a new site, there should not be any errors in the sitemap.xml.
By now, your interest should be piqued… if you need just a little bit more motivation, check out this really cool Webmaster Tools checklist. I’ve never seen anything quite like this on the web, and I want to implement checklists for you on Website In A Weekend for handling all sorts of chores!
When you really need to dig deep, here’s those links I promised above:
- Jody Nimetz on “Why You Should Use Google Webmaster Tools“
- Elizabeth (“stormyweather”) on the “Benefits of Google Webmaster Tools To You…“
- Steven Gardner presents Top 5 Benefits of Google Webmaster Tools
As you can see, these are all excellent articles, and I encourage to read them thoroughly. Look for future articles here on Website In A Weekend which will go into more detailed analysis on specific capabilities of Webmaster Tools, and how you can use them to improve your website immensely.
Using Arne Brachold’s XML Sitemaps plugin has an added benefit of submitting to Microsoft’s new Bing service, Yahoo (with a developer ID), and Ask.com. Each of these search engines holds a small but vital segment of web search, don’t leave them out of your traffic building strategy!
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This is a must tool to have if you want get high ranking at Google search.
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
I don’t use Webmaster Tools nearly enough. Would you like to do a series on the topic?
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..Blogging Goals for 2010: Answers are Easy, the Questions are Hard!
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