Google Web Master Tools Site Verification

February 4th, 2010 Tags: attraction marketing, google site map, google site verification, google webmaster tools, home business, robots.txt, social media, spyware prevention, spyware prevention tips, xml site map
Posted in Miscellaneous

[button style=”tick” color=”#222226″ border=”#000000″]Premium[/button] Hopefully your computer has remained spyware free so you can get down to using it for business and pleasure without any headaches. Many of our customers are home and small business owners and some only have “one” computer.  With internet threats on the rise more than ever before, these businesses are very vulnerable by having only one computer, because it can quickly become a critical weak point if it gets infected. So press-on with your education about spyware prevention with our spyware prevention tips and never let your shields down!

For all the business types with Websites. You probably heard that these days, you need a WordPress Blog, and you also signed-up for Facebook and Twitter, but it hasn’t exploded your business yet. Well, now that you have conquered the spyware problem (for now), have you checked how your website ranks in Google lately? If you aren’t getting ranked or are just getting low rankings, you should check to see if your site has even been verified by Google. Once verified, you can analyze some important information Google has compiled about your site using Google Webmaster Tools, and it is free of course. Sure, there are other analytics tools out there, but the more information you can measure about the performance of your site, the better prepared you will be to target your efforts on the details that need improvement. There are a few different ways to get your site verified by Google, but the text below outlines the method I used. You will have to read between the lines and get the details from each of the websites themselves. If you are internet savvy, it might just be self-explanatory.

[box type=”info” style=”rounded” border=”full”]
You must be a Paid Premium Member to access the rest of this content.
Click to Subscribe[/box]
[private_premium]

Google XML Sitemaps Plugin for WordPress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

• Install the Google XML Sitemap Plugin to your WordPress folder of the domain you want to verify and activate it.
• Note the url for the “sitemap.gz” file  that the Google XML Sitemap generated in the root folder of your domain.
• (example) http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.gz

Robot Control Code Generation Tool

http://www.mcanerin.com/en/search-engine/robots-txt.asp

• Using the Robot Control Code Generation Tool, enter your “http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.gz” to generate the text for your robots.txt file.
• Using notepad, create a text file named robots.txt and copy the text generated by the Robot Control Code Generation Tool
• FTP this file to the root folder of your domain. You may need to change the attributes of this file for Google Webmaster Tool to read it. I had to change mine to “644”

Google Webmaster Tools

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

• Sign-in to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google acct info (same as gmail)
• Add your domain (example http://yoursite.com)
• Click “Verify This Site”.
• If you use the Meta Tag method, you will need to copy the code they provide into the head section of the code for your site. Some premium themes have a section for entering header code very easily.
• If you use the Html Method, download the provided file and FTP it to the root folder of your domain.
• Click Verify
• Check back regularly to check your stats. Google will provide you with the rankings of the keywords it detects as well as monitoring inbound links and more.
• Once you see you highest rated keywords, go ahead and Google them yourself and see your page in Google using a keyword search.

Recent Experience

I recently had the targeted keyword phrase “cyberdefender reviews” ranking Number One within 2 days of submitting only “1” article to EzineArticles, but I did not know this until I had my site verified with Google. It has slipped a bit since, but is still in the top ten. Many other of my keywords are still ranking in the top 10. Needless to say, I am suddenly getting traffic to this page very quickly, and Google Webmaster Tools is helping me with the information I need about what works great and what needs tweaking.

I also suggest you sign up for Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts and enter keywords you want to get alerts on when someone else posts content related to your niche using these keywords. You can then make a Reply or Comment on the Forum or Blog or whatever it is and leave  your Signature with a link back to your blog or capture page.

This is quickly generating traffic I never believed could happen this fast! You’ll find that the alerts you get for these keywords might be similar in nature, so you could probably prepare a file with a standard blurb and your signature which you can modify as needed when making your Comments and Replies.

I also like to use Firefox to do all this because it does such a good job at remembering user names and passwords. I mention this because some of these forums require you to register first, and if you ever get another alert for the same site, you can login quickly while letting Firefox remember the login info for you automatically.

I know this info will help!  Please get your site verified asap so you can get access to the info that Google knows about your page performance. I don’t know why this info wasn’t brought out with great emphasis in anything I ever learned before. My hat goes off to Michael Campbell and a recent Newsletter of his that put it this way:

• Professionals have a robots.txt file, amateurs don’t.

So be a professional and implement this today. If you already have, then share the love and retweet this article, otherwise, I would be interested in reading some positive comments about your experience.

If you are interested into getting a Free 8 Day Bootcamp of video training about using Social Media and Attraction Marketing to promote your business online, check out: http://www.socialnetworkmavericks.com[/private_premium]