Google Webmaster Tools and your blog

Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 9:39 am

Google Webmaster Tools are something you should be using for your blog. There latest announcement adds another reason to make sure that you are using the tools.

The latest announcement “Is Your Site Hacked?” says that they will be trying to notify those sites where they find signs of hacking.

This alone would make it worthwhile but there is a lot more to what Webmaster Tools offer. It will let you see how Google views your site.

You can find out if they are having trouble crawling your site or if they have found problems.

You will be able to see what links they are showing to your site and even the anchor text being used. These is important information you really need to know and a few minutes a week can show you any problems you are having that you may not be aware of.

Finally it is relatively easy and painless to set up. You will need a Gmail account to login as you do with most Google services.

Click on the add site button and fill in the url of your blog.

This will generate a meta tag that you will copy and add to your header file on your blog.

Add it to your header file below the other meta tags and save.

editheader

Then click the verify link. This will take you to the dashboard for the site if you have completed it successfully.

verify1

The final step is to submit your sitemap If you are using the Google Sitemap plugin this will be yourdomain/sitemap.xml.

Well worth the few minutes to set this up for the information you get and to keep current with how Google is seeing your blog.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.

After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.

If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.