The first step to tell search engines about your blog is to submit it to the Google search console (old webmaster tool). There, you can manage your site, find your backlinks and statistics. If you’re a new blogger or site owner, you will find some issues with the verification process, because it needs HTML knowledge if you have a complicated theme without the appropriate options.
Today, I’ll show you how to verify a WordPress blog with Google webmaster tools, without the need to edit your theme or modify your blog files.
Why verifying a blog with Google Search Console?
If you really want to rank well in search engines, you have to add and verify your website with Google. It’s not just a process, you’ll add value to your blog when it’s verified. At the same time, Google itself needs to get easy access to your posts to index them. The Google sitemap option, for example, helps to crawl your blog.
Also, your webmaster dashboard tells you about your blog health, backlinks, search appearance, and much more. So, you should verify your blog with Google Search Console.
Verify your blog with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin
In your Google webmaster dashboard, you get multiple options to verify your blog. The easiest way is the ”Meta tag” in the ”alternative methods” tab, as the screenshot below.
Then, select ”HTML tag” to get the code as below example.
Now, you need to paste the code into WordPress. The easiest and fastest way is to install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, where you can paste your Google code easily.
After the plugin activation, click on ”SEO” from the WordPress menu, and you will get the options to add the Google code tag as below:
As you can see, the SEO plugin allows you also to verify your blog with Bing and Alexa. After adding your Google meta tag code, click the “save changes” button and come back to the search console, and click the “verify” button. Now, you are just verified your WordPress blog with Google.
Google will know that you’re the site owner, you’ll get notifications about your blog performance and how it appears on the Google search page.
Of course, you need to verify your blog with Bing and Alexa to get more information and statistics. Bing webmaster tool also gives you more statistics from their search engine.
The best thing about the free SEO WordPress plugin is that you can verify your blog easily without the need to install multiple plugins for each service. This helps to reduce the loading time and make things easy and fast.
A new verification option was added to the Yoast plugin. Now, you can verify your Pinterest page, which becomes a great way to get traffic to websites with lots of images as content. You can also verify your website with Yandex webmaster tools. Yandex is a great search engine that uses a completely different algorithm that Google uses, and you should get your site verified with them.
Another option is the JetPack plugin from WordPress. They’ve added a site verification option that you can enable and add your Google code. Just select ”Jetpack” from the top left menu in the WordPress admin area, and then, use ”Settings”. Enable the verification option and add do the rest.
Please note that with my experience, Google will ask you to verify your blog after some months in general. They need to verify again the ownership of the blog when updating their algorithm and tools. So, never delete the code from your site, even after the successful verification.
