- How to Add Your Site to Google Search Console and Why is it Necessary.
- What is Google Search Console?
- How to Add Your Site to Google Search Console
- Sign into Account and Add your site
- Verify your domain in Search Console
- - When your DNS provider is not on the list
- - If your hosting differs from your registrar
- Verification for a URL prefix property
- Add a sitemap to Google Search Console
- Add a user to Google Search Console
- Conclusion
If you are a website owner or business owner trying to optimize your site, then you might have heard about Google Search Console. If you’re not familiar with Search Console you might not realize how important it is.
Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service from Google that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your website’s appearance in their search results.
Search Console offers tools and reports for the following actions:
- Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
- Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
- View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which searches queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
- Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
- Show you which sites link to your website.
- Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other search features.
Let’s Learn about setting up an account and how using Search Console for a professional search optimization campaign can help your business grow in the long run. Once you have an account you can begin to explore what Google Search Console is used for in SEO.
Sign in to Search Console with your Google account. You should see a welcome message with two options. Select the first one, then enter your domain or subdomain (without the HTTP(s)://). Press “Continue.”
Fig (a) Enter your domain name and continue
Google states that “domain properties show data for all URLs under the domain name, including all protocols, subdomains, and paths.”
This is perfect if you want a complete view of your website in Search Console, but what if you want to restrict data to a specific URL path (e.g., domain.com/blog).
The answer is to use a URL prefix property instead. This adds only URLs under a specified address and protocols i.e HTTP or HTTPS
Fig (b) Add URL with Prefix and press continue
Note: You can add both Domain and URL prefix properties for the same domain.
Before any data appears in Search Console, you first need to verify ownership. This process differs according to the property type you added.
Before you can see any data in Search Console, you first need to verify your site. This process differs according to the property type you added.
If so, select the provider and hit the “Start verification” button. Sign in to your domain provider’s account and follow the instructions.
You should see a message like this once the site is verified.
Fig (c) Verification is Successful
If your domain provider isn’t on the dropdown, select “Any DNS provider.”
Sign in to your account with your domain provider, select your domain, then look for an option to manage DNS(Domain Name Servers).
Choose the option to add a TXT record, paste in the record from Search Console, then save it. Go back to Search Console and Press “Verify.” If the verification fails, keep trying. It can take a few minutes to go through.
If your web host differs from your domain registrar, then you may find that your registrar doesn’t let you edit DNS records. In that case, you’ll need to edit DNS records on your hosting account instead. If you’re doing this in cPanel, it’s super simple.
Login to your account >select your site
Fig (d) Select the site you want to verify
Select manage DNS > Add record > Type > TXT
Fig (e) Select manage DNS
Next, choose a name, copy and paste the TXT record from Search Console into the “content” box, then hit “Add record.”
Fig (f) Select manage DNS and add the record
Google offers a few ways to do this. The default (and recommended) method is to upload an HTML file to your website. However, to keep things simple, we recommend choosing the Domain name provider option, then following the instructions given above.
Fig (g) Verification of URL prefix Property
The Sitemap section of Search Console is used for submitting a site’s list of total pages so that Googlebot can more easily, and more quickly crawl them. This is a step that is encouraged by Google!
You can use the Sitemaps report to tell Google about new sitemaps for your domain, see how frequently they get crawled, and see any errors that Google encountered when parsing your submitted sitemaps.
To do that, choose “Sitemaps” from the menu, paste the URL of your XML sitemap into the box labeled “Enter sitemap URL,” then hit “Submit.”
Fig (h) Adding sitemap in google search console
After adding this message will appear.
Fig (i) Sitemap added successfully
Users are people with access to some or all of the data in the Search Console.
There are three types:
Owner: Has full control over the property in Search Console, including the power to add and remove other users. There are two types of owners: verified and delegated.
Full user: Has view rights to all data within the selected property and the power to take some actions.
Restricted user: Has restricted view rights, meaning they may not be able to view all data.
By default, when you verify a property in Search Console, you have owner privileges.
To add another user, go to:
Search Console > Choose a property > Settings > Users and permissions > Add user
Fig (j) Add user to Search Console.
Type their email address, then select either full or restricted access.
Fig (k) Add user to Search Console.
Google Search Console is a powerful free tool that shows a lot of data and insights about your website. We hope this guide has helped acquaint you with Google Search Console.
Now that everything is set up and verified, you can start taking in all the information that Google Search Console has for you. Feel free to ask any questions. K2 blocks is a WordPress plugin developed by Pookidevs. You can contact us for custom plugin development at our Official site.