For those of you who don’t know, Google Webmaster Tools is a fantastic utility that can be accessed via the Google Search Console to help website owners get valuable information about their sites performance and any issues that might be affecting it; such as malware for instance. The best thing about Webmaster Tools? It’s completely free to use! Before you can take advantage of this free tool, however, you will need to verify your site with Google first. This is to ensure that you are indeed the owner of the site that you claim is yours – otherwise anybody could look at the private search data Google has amassed about your site and even manipulate how the search engine crawls your site (something you definitely don’t want someone else being in charge of). Firstly, you will need to add a property (your website) to your Google Search Console. Anyone can do this, but it’s not until verification that a specific user is linked to that specific property. It is worth taking not that a website can have more than one verified user linked with it, should you wish to give more people permissions to view the data about your property. There are five ways to verify your ownership of the website. HTML File Upload This is the easiest and most common form of verification offered:
- Simply download a HTML file that Google provide for you (googlea940319cbfacc90a.html) and upload this file to your website, in our case it would be http://www.yoma.co.uk.
- You can check the upload was a success by visiting your site with the HTML file tagged onto the end of it, for example, our search would look like this – http://www.yoma.co.uk/googlea940319cbfacc90a.html.
- Then all you can to do is click verify on the Search Console and you’re all done.
Make sure that the file is not removed, even after verification, because this will negate your verified status and you will have to do it again. HTML Tag Adding a meta tag to your sites homepage is another common and simple way to achieve your verified status:
- All you need to do is copy this meta tag – – and paste it within the home page of your site.
- Make sure that goes within thesection, yet before the firstsection.
- Click verify on the Search Console.
Again, the tag must not be taken out, even after verification. Domain Name Provider You can also verify your site via the company that provided your domain name, depending on who this was you can verify in one of two ways:
- Some domain registrars allow you to verify directly from the Search Console, these are available from a drop-down menu so have a look and see if yours is there then follow the steps to completion.
- If your registrar does not allow you to verify from the Search Console, then it can still be completed manually by adding a DNS record. The verification tool will provide thorough instructions on how to complete this that will be specific to your registrar.
Google Analytics If you already use Google Analytics for your site, this can also be used to aid verification quickly. Just be sure you are following these rules:
- Make sure that you are using the asynchronous tracking code within your site.
- Ensure that he tracking code is in thesection of the page.
- Set the ‘edit’ permission for the Analytics website.
Google Tag Manager Similarly to Analytics, Google Tag Manager will also let you verify ownership if you use it already. There are two things you must make sure of before it will allow you, though:
- You need to be using the container snippet within your site.
- Be sure the ‘manage’ permission is allowed within the Tag Manager container.
Yoma, the ecommerce web design company, are fully equipped to answer all of your questions regarding Google Webmaster Tools – or anything else you may want to fire at us! Why not get in touch with us to see if we can provide the perfect solution for you?
