What is Webmaster Tools and Do I Need It?

Webmaster Tools essentially is a free web service offered by Google that assists in monitoring the index status of a website, ultimately leading to better visibility on search engines.

Do you need it?  Yes.  Getting it can be as simple as giving it to your webmaster, but if you aren’t able to do that, we will attempt to make it as simple as possible for you!

If you use WordPress for your site build like 40% of sites around the world, there are going to be easy to use plugins for you to input information into.  For example, take the well-known Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.  You will simply input the code you will receive later from webmaster tools.

If you don’t do the Yoast plugin, you can always search for other plugins that are specifically for inputting Webmaster Tools code.

To start up Google Webmaster Tools in the first place, go to the following link and then click “add site” in the top right corner.  Begin filling in appropriate information.

You’ll see a line of code that will look like the following:

<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”W00HeW-h5U3LwC1O9Pm8GpLZK4f8Gwim_gHCKBPLyR4″ />

If you have a plugin that you can easily input appropriate code, you will be able to derive it at this point.  For the above example, you could input W00HeW-h5U3LwC1O9Pm8GpLZK4f8Gwim_gHCKBPLyR4.

If you don’t have access to any sort of code to your site (or simply don’t want to deal with it), then skip the recommended method.  There are alternate methods available, such as uploading a HTML file to your site.  You can download this and send it to whoever is in charge of your site, asking them politely upload to the site.
If you already have Google analytics, follow the instructions there.

Once all verified you will have access to tons of great information, such as information on the overall health of your website, traffic statistics and keyword positioning, ways of communicating information to Google in regards to indexing and crawling your website, and much more.

If you have any questions about this information, please don’t hesitate contacting us today!