Wordpress

Register your blog with Google

Jon July 28, 2011 13 Comments

At this point in our Start a Money Making Blog series, you should have your blog up and running, looking great and have at least 10 high quality articles published.  A common mistake many bloggers make is to think that their blog will just suddenly get picked up by Google and a rush of traffic will arrive. Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Unless your blog is linked from another credible blog or website, Google won’t find you right away, if at all.  In lieu of getting a link from a credible site, one way to get your site on Google’s radar is to register your blog with Google.

Register your blog with Google

To register your blog with Google, we’ll use a site Google provides for webmasters (yes that’s you) called Google Webmaster Tools.  Just login using your Google account (if you don’t have one, create one) and you’ll be presented with the main home page.  Follow these steps to add your site:

  1. Click the Add a Site… button
  2. Enter the URL of your site and press Continue.  One note here, it’s very important that you use the right URL.  If your site is set-up to be preceeded by www, than enter the www, otherwise leave it off.  If you aren’t sure how your site is set-up, login to your hosting account and see how you set it up.  Most sites have the www.
  3. Now we’ll have to verify your site.  I recommend using Google’s recommended method which involves downloading an HTML file and uploading it to your server.  Just follow the instructions Google provides.  If you need a refresher on how to upload a file to your server, read over my What is FTP article.
  4. Once your HTML file is uploaded, click the verify button.
  5. That’s it, your site is now registered with Google.

Submit a Sitemap

Next you’ll want to submit a sitemap so that Google can easily find and index all that great content you’ve been writing.  A sitemap is a special file that is placed on your website that contains a listing of all the URLs to each of your websites pages.  So instead of Google having to find your content, the sitemap actually maps out all of your content for Google so that it can easily find it.  If you’re curious, you can view the sitemap for Side Income Blogging here.

The easiest way to do this is to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  Once installed and activated, head over to the settings page (Settings>>XML-Sitemap).  At the top will be text that says “The sitemap wasn’t built yet. Click here to build it the first time.”  Click the “Click here” link to generate your sitemap for the first time.  From that point on, the plugin will automatically update your sitemap and notify Google of your new content.

Now that we have a sitemap, we need to return to Google Webmaster tools and tell it about your new sitemap.  To do this, do the following:

  1. Login to Google Webmaster Tools
  2. From the home page, select your site.  You’ll be presented with the Dashboard for your site.
  3. Open the Site configuration menu to left by clicking on the + sign.  Select Sitemaps.
  4. Click on Submit a Sitemap.  When prompted for the location, your domain name will already be populated.  All you have to type is: sitmap.xml.
  5. Click on Submit Sitemap.
That’s it, your sitemap is now submitted.  Come back in a few minutes, view your sitemap and it should show a green check box indicating it was successfully processed.  If not, just follow the steps above again, you most likely typed something wrong or the Google XML Sitemaps plugin isn’t working correctly.

A little help

While registering your site and sitemap with Google Webmaster tools certainly doesn’t guarantee it will help your site, in my personal experience it has proven to get my sites indexed much quicker and results in seeing search engine traffic much sooner.  As we’ll explore soon, getting search engine traffic is critical for earning money from advertisements.  Getting search engine traffic is the key strategy we’ll explore to earn a side income blogging.  So stay tuned.

Those of you with experience has registering your site with Webmaster tools and submitting a sitemap helped your site?  Any cons that you can think of?  Join in, add a comment!

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AboutJon Gillham
I am a 33 year old husband, father of 3, engineer and a huge fan of developing systems to build useful and profitable websites. The reason I build online businesses is to provide financial independence for my family and yours AND so I can spend time outside skiing and biking with my family.
Jon Gillham, Online Entrepreneur
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Comments (13)

  1. Paul
    December 19, 2011

    I’ve just been trying to figure out why my blog has not been showing up in google and this gives me a good place to start.

    Thanks

  2. Kute
    June 13, 2012

    Thanks larry 4 ur suport. Pls can u explain to me how to intengrate adsense ‘for domain? Is it d same way of copyin adsense code & pasting on d blogs like ‘content? Am stil new in blogging how can i put adsense code on my blog? Also how can intengrate an existing adsense acct to my existing google blogger? Because i av a blogspot 4rm google. Lastly, is it posible to put a search box,social sharing buttons and feedburner on google blogspot? If yes pls put me tru.Pls reply quick. Thanks

  3. Joshua
    July 17, 2012

    Thanks for this! It worked like a charm and the steps were so easy to follow!

    • Larry
      July 17, 2012

      Glad to help Joshua and thanks for the comment!

  4. Erick
    August 12, 2012

    It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d without a doubt donate to this fantastic blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to
    my Google account. I look forward to brand new updates and will talk about this blog with my Facebook group.
    Chat soon!

  5. kim masters
    February 4, 2013

    Hi Larry,

    Thanks for this article, it’s really helpful. I have moved my blog to wordpress and am just about to register it with google. I will also have a go at doing a sitemap as I now have 110 posts.

    Really appreciate this article, thank you!

    • Larry
      February 4, 2013

      Hey Kim – Sounds like you’re doing the right things. Congrats on 110 posts, no small feat. Keep it up!

  6. Midwestjoy
    February 4, 2013

    Hi Larry,
    I am a bit puzzled why webmaster tools list my site once without the “www” and once with it? It looks like I have two different sites and it lists stats for each one. It’s the same on my Google Analytics. Thank you for the helpful articles. Your articles are much easier to follow and understand than the tutorials by google.

    Midwestjoy

    • Larry
      February 5, 2013

      Google considers them two different sites. You fix this by choosing which site you want and redirecting one to the other. This is done by a simple addition to your .htaccess file or through a configuration setting with your hosting company. Just google it, you’ll find tons of articles showing you how. For example, here on side income blogging, I don’t use www. If you put http://www.sideincomeblogging.com, you’ll get redirected to sideincomeblogging.com.

      You don’t want two sites, and want one to redirect to the other.

  7. Midwestjoy
    February 5, 2013

    Thank you Larry

  8. Salud de la Mujer
    August 21, 2013

    Hello there! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept chatting about this. I will forward this page to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thank you for sharing!

  9. Alexandre KOWALCZYK
    August 21, 2013

    Thanks for the tip about the Sitemap I didn’t know about the plugin !

    I found that the Google Webmaster Tools have changed, you should correct your article, and replace
    “Open the Site configuration menu to left by clicking on the + sign. Select Sitemaps.”
    by
    “On the left menu click on Crawl, then on Sitemaps”

    Regards,

    Alexandre

    • Larry
      August 21, 2013

      Thanks for catching that, I’ll get it updated. Keeping old content accurate is tough!