How To Verify WordPress blog in Google Search Console Tool

Like most of the other bloggers in the blogosphere, my primary focus is to get more Google juice. Little do I care about Yahoo, Bing or anything alike. There is Google search, and there’s everyone else. Naturally, I’m much concerned about how my blog gets crawled by Google and about what content get’s indexed by Google.

Google Webmaster tools tells me the inside story of how users find my website through Google. In my opinion, WSearch Console tool is like an ECG device that displays the heart beat of internet traffic – Google being the heart.

To be able to use this free service by Google for your website, you should prove them that you are the owner of the website you claim. Google lets you verify ownership of a website using three methods:

• Meta tag
• Upload an HTML file.
• DNS Verification

Now the question is how to verify your self-hosted WordPress blog with Google Webmaster Tools? This question has been answered multiple numbers of times before. Let me answer it again, with a bonus of showing you the cleanest way.

Google Webmaster tools verification methods:

FTP an HTML file

The disadvantage of this method is that you will need an FTP client installed on your PC. We WordPress bloggers don’t use FTP frequently, do we? Use FTP just once to install WordPress and that’s it, use the WordPress admin to do every upload task such as uploading a picture or a theme or a plugin. How thoughtfully WordPress dashboard has been built!

Add a meta tag to header file

You can follow the steps shown by Don Campbell in below video and add a meta tag to header.php in your file.

The disadvantage of this method is that you have got to repeat this step each time you change a theme. Furthermore, incorrect changes done to theme’s header file may crash your blog. Face it, who wants to meddle with the code — and screw a blog that was working properly until then.

Use All in One SEO Pack plugin *

* This the cleanest method to verify ownership. Download and install the WordPress Plugin — All in One SEO Pack. Once you are done with the installation, all you have to do is:
Go to WordPress admin -> Settings -> All in one SEO, and paste the meta code into the text area called “Additional Home Headers.” Go to Verify Ownership page in Google webmaster tools and click on the verify button.

Additional Home Headers section in All in One SEO plugin
Apparently, this article is biased towards this method. So the disadvantages shall not be mentioned :-). The best part of using All in SEO plugin is, there are other magical features offered by this plugin that can help you tweak SEO with least efforts.

Once you are done with the site verification it’s time to generate your sitemap usingGoogle XML sitemap plugin.

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