noob2geek » Webmastering

How to add a site to Google Webmaster Tools

Santhosh — Sat, 15 May 2010 02:47:12 +0000

As explained earlier about the basics of Google Webmaster tools over here, Google Webmaster tool is a great online tool for any webmaster with deep interest in SEO for enhancing the visibility of site on the search results. Now that you have read the introduction to Google Webmaster Tools, now it’s time to get started with it and start using it. Before you get to see and do stuffs over there, you must add your website and get it verified. So this short tutorial will teach you how to add a site to Google Webmaster Tools.

Adding a site to Google Webmaster Tools is really easy and can be done within two minutes. Getting verified is also easy but the time consumption depends on how quick you are at doing it.

Follow these steps to add a site to Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Login to your Google Webmaster Tools Account.
2. Click on “Add a site” button
3. Enter the URL of your site. (Such as: www.example.com)
4. Click on Continue button.

5. Now you need to get it verified using any of the three available methods. The three verification methods given to you are “Meta Tags”, “Upload an HTML” and “Add a DNS Record”
6. I suggest you to go for either Meta Tags or Upload an HTML method of verification.

If you choose, Meta Tag method, then copy the meta tag below, and paste it into your site’s home page. It should be pasted within and section

If you choose, Upload an HTML method, then download the verification file and upload it to your site and click on the confirmation link.

7. After you finish doing any of those method, click on “Verify” button to get it verified.

Do note that Google Webmaster Tools considers www.example.com and example.com as different sites. So don’t forget to add both the versions of your site. (with and without www). You can even add subdomains like, linux.example.com.

That’s it. Stay tuned other tutorials on how to use various other features of Google Webmaster Tools.

Redirecting a Web Page with 301 Redirection using .htaccess file.

Santhosh — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:08:47 +0000

Web Page redirection is used to redirect your web traffic to any page or website you need to. That will ensure that you won’t lose any traffic after you make some changes on your site’s link structure.

Why 301 Redirect?
301 Redirection is used to redirect your web page permanently. This is one of the best way to redirect a page which will ensure that you do not lose any traffic and page rankings. 301 redirection can be setup easily using .htaccess file.

What is .htaccess file?
.htaccess is short for “hypertext access”. This file can be placed in any of your website’s directory. It can commonly be found in website’s root directory. This file will enable your server to direct your visitors and or search engine crawlers/bots to perform specified instructions like redirection, authorization, rewriting URLs and blocking up IPs and or websites.

Why to setup a 301 Web Page redirection using .htaccess file:
For instance, if you have a page example.com/flowers.html and then you moved all it’s content to example.com/freshflowers.html page, you will sure lose some traffic if you chose to remove the old page. Though you can place a text and a link on your old page stating that this page has been moved, it is not recommended to do it since search engines do not mind your message. Only visitors who manually go through that page will land in your new page.

This can also be done, if you have moved your page to a new domain. Like if example.com/flowers.html has been moved to example.org/flowers.html.

How to setup a 301 Web Page redirection using .htaccess file:

1. If you already have a .htaccess file in your website’s root directory, download it and skip to Step 2. If not, you will need to create a .htaccess file. In order to create a new .htaccess file, just open any basic text editor like notepad or gedit if you are on linux and save it as .htaccess without any extensions. This will create a new blank .htaccess file.

2. Now open the .htaccess file your just created or downloaded and add this code at the end in a new line.

If you are redirecting a page within your website (consider your site is example.com):

redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

If you are redirecting a page to a new domain (from example.com to example.org):

redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.org/newpage.html

3. Save the file and upload to your server.

Now test whether the redirection is working or not by entering the old URL in your web browser.

Do note that you should specify the correct path to the page you want to redirect. In the above example, I have considered only the top-level directory. If your page is inside a another directory, say “webdesign”, you will have specify the path like /webdesign/oldpage.html. And do not prefix http://www in your old page url. You must just begin it with / (this slash means your root folder of your website).

To sum it up, 301 web page redirection is best and safest way to place a permanent redirect since it will send your traffic to the new page and as well as carry the search engine ranking.

Introduction to Google Webmaster Tools

Santhosh — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:15:47 +0000

If you are running a website and working hard to enhance its web presence and to help maintain a good status of the flow of traffic, then you ought to work out on several aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Though you can do most of the optimization stuff manually, it will be good if you use a better tool to help manage it. And if you are very much interested in optimizing your site for Google search engine, then Google has a well developed tool for it. And that is the “Google Webmaster Tools”

Who is Webmaster?

Webmaster is a person who manages the server configurations, administrates, tweak, maintain and authors the website etc. In most of the cases, a webmaster is someone one owns a website and does all the above mentioned jobs. However, big websites and companies hire webmasters to do those jobs.

What is Google Webmaster Tools?

The Google Webmaster Tools is a free online service offered by Google. This tool concentrates on how a Webmaster can manage the visibility of his/her website on the search results of Google. It is also used to help tweak the website for better crawling performance and thus to help keep the good status of the website. Though this tool is made only for Google search results, it helps tweak the website for better performance on other search engines in some way or the other. You will know how and why later in this post.

What all can Google Webmaster Tools let its user do?

Check the status of Crawl Rate and tweak it.

Using this, a webmaster can check the speed at which the Googlebot is crawling the website. And with the help of some tools, the webmaster can set the Crawl Rate of the website. Increasing the crawl rate will increase the rate of requests done by the googlebot during the process of crawling the pages on the website. The faster the crawl rate is, the faster your contents get crawled. However, Google doesn’t recommend you to set higher crawl rate unless you have issues with traffic.

See the list of Internal and External pages to the website.

This tool helps a webmaster to see how many links are pointing towardsthe website from other websites (External) and how many pages are being linked within the website (Internal). Google Webmaster Tools lets to see a whole lot of details in this stuff. A webmaster can see the number of non-existing (404) pages being linked to your website from other sites and also to see the anchor text of the link and more.

Keep an eye on Keywords.

This tool also helps a webmaster to have a look at the most crawled Keywords by Google on the website. One can analyze this and use the keywords in the META tag of the pages to help get better search results. Do remember that the list contains the keywords that are present in your website content and not the keywords which drive traffic to your website. There is another option which lets your see which keywords are driving traffic as well.

View the statistics about the performance of Google Indexes of the website.

This will help a webmaster to see and analyze how a website is being indexed on Google search engine.
Submit and manage Sitemap to Google.
A webmaster can use this tool to submit the Sitemap of the website. This is useful when you make changes on the base architecture and link structure in your website. This helps Google to discover the pages which it might not otherwise.

Manage Sitelinks.

Sitelinks are the links to the internal pages of a website. These links appear below in a snippet on the search result page. This appears mostly on top of all results and when the exact phrase, word or keyword is being used to search which is very closely related to the website.

Not all the websites have Sitelinks. Google will automatically generate this as the site gets more attention. This tool can only be used to remove the links if you don’t like any.

Generate and manage a robot.txt file.

A robot.txt file is a file used to configure how a web spider or a crawler bot should access your website content. You can limit a web spider to crawl only preferred pages or categories of your website. This can be used for privacy purpose and to disable all your content from being crawled. Without doing this, your content will be publicly viewable for all the web spiders. If your website doesn’t have a robot.txt, then you can use this tool to create one.

Change the address of your website.

If you are thinking of moving your website to a new domain with the existing content, you can use this tool to let Google know that you have moved on to a new domain and submit the new URL and redirect the web spider to crawl the content on your new URL. This will help make Google to update the index of your website and enabled faster and smoother transition from old domain to the new one.

This ends the brief introduction of the Google Webmaster Tools. I will write on how to use several features listed in this post and others in upcoming days. So stay tuned.