gregprogramming

I’m an avid user of Google products ever since I opened up my first GMail account; It is pretty much my online hub. I use Chrome as my default browser (Firefox for development though), GMail for mail, Google Reader for RSS, iGoogle for everything newsie along with Analytics and the rest.

I’ve always been intrigued by Google Webmaster Tools; it’s a simple interface with nothing special but It helps me keep up to date with what’s going on with my site. Analytics is great for seeing trends, users and how people are finding you but that’s not what this article is about.

Step 1: Set up your site.

Google will ask that you verify that the site belongs to you; Since we’re using WordPress I would suggest grabbing the HTML file instead of updating the META tags. Why? If you change or update your theme you loose your Meta but not your HTML file. So Download the file, Upload it to your WordPress folder and then Verify.

Step 2: Submit a Sitemap

Grab a copy of Google XML Sitemaps plugin, upload and activate it.  There are full installation instructions on the Plugin’s WordPress Instructions Page; You can fiddle with the sitemap configuration along the way so that it best suits your site.  Now that your set up go on over to your Google Webmaster Tools account and under Site Configuration click on Site Maps.  This is the easy part now. Click on Submit a site map, finish of the url , click on the button next to it and voila! Go to Sitemaps.org for more information on sitemaps.

Step 3: Monitor and Adjust

Once you’ve set up your site map you have to wait for Google to index your site.  Check the sitemaps sections and see how things are doing.  If there fine good! if not then you need to do some checking.  The main culprit, go to Crawler Access under Site Configuration, I’ve had is my robots.txt and I found an article on Wordpress.org about SEO that helped with fixing my file.  There’s more information on that same page that will help with Technorati and others if that interests you at all.  Google also offers a robots.txt generator within the same section which you can play around with to get your file just right.  For more info on Robots.txt check out Robotstxt.org.

Final Thoughts

I figure the quicker you let Google know the quicker they find you and the sooner you get indexed.