[Video] Marketing Academy Secrets: How to Set Up Google’s Webmaster Tools

In episode 17 of Marketing Academy Secrets, we reveal the benefits of using Google’s Webmaster Tools and walk you through how to get set up.If you’re serious about driving traffic online and you utilize a website (which I assume almost everyone does), you really have to set up Google Webmaster Tools. It’s like Google Analytics’ more technical brother. The reason why it’s so important is because it’s where Google decides whether your site is OK to crawl. And by “crawling” I mean searching through your site. So when consumers are searching for answers to questions, your site can show up.

To get started with Google Webmaster Tools, you need to have a Gmail or Google Apps account. Once you have that set up, you go to google.com/webmasters/tools and there you can use your Gmail or Google Apps account to sign in and set up a Webmaster Tools account. The next thing it’s going to do is ask you for some form of verification. There’s a few ways that you can do that. One is through your Google Analytics account (assuming that you have one). If you don’t, don’t worry about that right now. The other option is that they’ll give you a snippet of code that you can insert into your website for them to verify that you have ownership. The thinking behind this type of verification is that only the owner of a website should be able to insert that little snippet of code.

Next, you want to add your XML site map to Google Webmaster Tools. In an earlier video, we covered Yoast’s SEO plugin, and that’s where you can insert your Webmaster Tools ID and also generate a site map. Generating a site map is super important because it lets Google know what pages to crawl and it also lets them know that you exist. Webmaster Tools will also tell you if there are any errors with crawling. This is critical because if Google isn’t crawling your site, your consumers won’t be able to find you via Google search.