Exploring Google Webmaster Tools
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 12:52 am
During the last couple of days I have applied several tweaks to optimise Blogsolid’s chances of getting indexed highly and today I started using Google Webmaster Tools. I’m an avid Google Analytics user, but for some reason I have never paid any attention to GWT (I’ve decided to abbreviate – “Google Webmaster Tools” is a mouthful!).
If you don’t have a Google account, you will have to sign up to use GWT. If you already have one, it’s simple to add GWT to your bag of goodies, however it doesn’t appear listed with the common Google apps. You can find it at google.com/webmasters/tools/.
GWT has a no-frills interface that allows you to adjust a few SEO nuts and bolts, but there are three things you need to do to get started:
- Add your site on the GWT dashboard
This is very straightforward, no explanation needed. - Verify your site – you have two options on this one:
- either add a meta tag within the <head></head> of your blog. GWT generates the tag and you just need to copy and paste it into your blog template. Once it is all set, click a button which tells Google to crawl your site in search of the verification tag,
- or upload an HTML file to the root directory of your blog. You have to save this file as the name GWT generates for you.
- Add an XML sitemap. This is probably the trickiest part, so I will try and explain two ways to do this:
- First you have to generate a sitemap for your blog. You can do this by using an online XML sitemap generator such as XML-Sitemaps.com. Once you have downloaded the sitemap file to your computer, upload it to the root of your blog, then tell GWT where to find it by entering the URL into the field provided.
- If you’re running wordpress, you can install a plugin to create a sitemap for you. I used the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. This plugin requires you to create two blank files in your blog’s root directory – one called “sitemap.xml” and the other called “sitemap.xml.gz”. Check the permissions on these files and make sure they’re fully writeable (CHMOD 666). Once the plugin is installed and activated, go to the options in your WordPress dashboard and do the deed. Tell GWT about the sitemap by entering the address in the provided field.
Phew! After all that you will definitely need a coffee break and then start exploring the Google Webmaster Tools. You can add more than one blog and monitor them all from the GWT dashboard.
As always, please feel free to add any SEO / GWT related tips, tricks and comments below.
Justin Hartman Says:
February 5th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Interesting take on things. I like the detail about GWT!
Imar Says:
February 5th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Hi Justin. Well, you found my blog post so I must be doing something right… Maybe joining Afrigator yesterday was a good move?