SEO Step By Step: Part 2 - Google Webmaster Tools

Posted by Seth Bracewell on Wednesday Feb 29, 2012 7:33 am

Okay, by now we've completed the basics of getting your site index-worthy covered in Step 1 of this series. You want to be sure to do those steps first, because if you get indexed before your site is ready the search results will not be correct and you could be losing out on potential traffic.

To see if your site is already indexed, enter site:www.yourdomainname.com in the Google search bar (see below).

At this point you are hoping for no results, so this is good. The first step is to implement Google Webmaster Tools on your site. You will need a Google account, which is beyond the scope of this entry. If you need help setting up an account, just contact us.

You will need to claim both the 'www' version of your site, and the non-www version (e.g. http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com). The easiest way is to reference your Google Analytics account. Or, we have a field in the Well Site Studio settings to put in your verification code. In either case, it can be done in under a minute.

Once you've claimed your site, here's my minimal list of things to do in Webmaster Tools.

1. Set Your Preferred Domain - In this case I I'll set it as www.sarasotawebdesignllc.com.
   
2. Set your geographic target country unless you want to be an international site. I've dealt enough with spam from overseas that if I can take any steps to avoid it I will. Setting a target of Canada or the US won't necessarily prevent it, but it doesn't hurt.
3. Set a higher Crawl Rate, at least for a little while. I set mine to 2 seconds between requests. While you're still building your site out and updating content frequently, you want Google to index your site more often than when it's established. Since you likely have little to no traffic anyway, it won't hurt your bandwidth. Just remember to change this in a few months.
4. Submit an XML Sitemap - There is an easy tool available here to generate your sitemap. There is a 500 page limit on this free version. We have bought the upgraded version so if your site is greater than 500 pages, let us know and we can help you out. You must upload your XML sitemap to your web server and tell Google where to find it.
   

That should do it for now. This whole process took about 15 minutes from start to finish, so it's not too painful if you know what you're doing.

Just for good measure I've added Bing Webmaster Tools and submitted 10 URLs. They only allow 10 per day and you have to write them in manually.

We'll skip the site metrics for this entry as there shouldn't be any change. We'll check back in a week or so to see if our site gets indexed properly.

---