How to Verify Your Website with Google Search Console and Yoast SEO

How to Verify Your Website with Google Search Console and Yoast SEO

You will need:

• You need a WordPress website
• Yoast SEO (find it here https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/)
• Google Search Console
• About 10 minutes

Directions to Verify Your Website with Google Search Console and Yoast SEO:

1. Login to WordPress
2. Click Plugins then Add New
3. Search for Yoast SEO
4. Click Install
5. Click Activate
6. Click SEO on the bottom left of the menu
7. click the tab Webmaster Tools
8. Next Goto https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
9. Click Ad dProperty
10. Enter in your domain name
11. Google will ask you to verify your domain name to show that you own it or control it
12. Click the radio button next to Verify HTML Tag
13. Copy the tag (Google will mke you copy all the code) I paste it into the browser bar or text editor and then just copy the code itself
14. Paste this into the Google Webmaster tools area and save
15. Go back to Google Search console and click verify
16. If it works you will see a green check
17. If it does not work try clearing your cache and then re verify
18. That’s it!

Adding a Sitemap to Google Search console

1. Goto the dashboard of your site on Google Search Console
2. Click the gray bar that says add sitemap
3. Click the sitemap button
4. Add the sitemap  XML name (with Yoast SEO this is typically sitemap_index.xml)
5. Save and your done!

What is Yoast SEO?

We highly recommend using only Yoast SEO for your SEO needs. This plugin will get the job done!

Yoast SEO description: WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, this was true when Joost wrote his original WordPress SEO article in 2008 (and updated every few months) and it’s still true today, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this Yoast SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. Yoast SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. As of May 20, 2015, Google rebranded Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console. [via Wikipedia]

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