Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics Account
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Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics Account

Setting up a Google Webmster tools and Analytics account offers users many tools that help Google find and browse your site. It will also provide statistical information about your website, visitors and traffic, and give you an indication of the health of your website as it appears to Google.

Go to Google Webmaster Tools and Open a New account:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Once in, go to ADD a SITE – making sure to include the “www.” (without the http://), or Google may see what you’ve entered as a different site than you intended. Google sees

http://mysite.com

http://www.mysite.com

http://www.mysite.com/index.php

as different sites (or certainly different pages). This can be very confusing of course, we recommend you always use the syntax of: http://www.mysite.com in all cases to avoid confusion with search engines, the internet, and especially in WordPress where the default is http://mysite.com .

You will then need to verify that you are the owner of your website. You can do this by either uploading a Google file by FTP to the root directory or by adding a line of code into the head section of your index file. Once this is done Google will start to show you some statistics about what it has discovered through crawling your website.

Webmaster tools can let you know things such as:

  • crawl errors and broken links
  • the number of inbound links to your website
  • the keyword terms people are searching for to find your website

Selecting the site on the home page will open up into a Dashboard. This screen will allow you to enter a Google site map ”sitemap.xml”. If you have a WordPress blog and installed the plug-in: XML Sitemaps, your plugin will automatically create a Google site map in the root directory of your website. Tell Google where to find it, and it will search your site for the pages the site map tells it to look for.

Please note that submitting a site map to Google does not automatically guarantee that your site will be found in Google’s search engine. Believe it or not it can still take months before you are ranked in the search engines unless you know what else Google wants.

The last thing you want to do for now is set up Google analytics:

go to

My Account > Analytics

in the top right-hand corner of the Accounts chart, click on + Add new account.

Follow through the steps until you get to a page that says

2) Paste this code on your website

if you have a WordPress site with the Google analytics plug-in installed all you need to do is find the UA# inside that code of text (UA-########-#), copy that number and paste it into the Analytics plugin on your blog. If you do not have a WordPress blog, you will have to copy the entire code and paste it at the bottom of every page of your website (before </body>). If you have a PHP site with a common footer you will only need to paste it once.

After a few days you will be able to log into the Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics Account to see the statistics of your blog or website – for more tips on WordPress see our other posts, or if you’re interested in a no-obligation quote, feel free to call our office at 1-888-688-6326.