Signup to Webmaster Tools Google Bing Yahoo

Once your website is ready, you need to inform search engines of its existence. This you do by registering or submitting your domain name to search engines. Register with Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. It is a good idea to signup with the webmaster tools of any search engine you register your website in, do not just submit and leave.

Webmaster tools enable professional web publishers to do more than just submit their websites’ domain name. Webmaster tools enable webmasters and publishers to manage and maintain their websites. Signing up to a search engine’s webmaster tools will enable you access useful information about your website. Some information provided by Webmaster tools include:

• Problems stopping robots from crawling your website
• Pages on your website that have been indexed i.e. added to the search engine database
• Websites linking to your website
• Missing or broken links on your website
• Errors on your website

Google webmaster tools will even go the extra mile of providing list of keywords that have the potential of bringing lots of visitors to your website. You could be missing a lot if you do not signup to webmaster tools of your popular search engines especially Google.

With webmaster tools, you can inform search engines of your sitemap location, which will help them crawl your website better. A sitemap in its most simple form is a list of URL of pages on your site. It may also include more than just URLs. If you are using blogger, you should submit your blog feed address as your sitemap address to webmaster tools.

You can manage more than one website with one webmaster tool account. Hence, webmaster tools provide webmaster with a convenient way of managing and maintaining all their websites.

Once your website has up to five pages, you should register it to a webmaster tool. The first thing you will be required to do once you submit your website URL is to authenticate the website. Authenticating your website will enable you benefit from the power of webmaster tools.

Most webmaster tools provide you with two authentication methods. One method is Meta tag method. In this method, the webmaster tool generates a Meta tag to be pasted on your website. Simply copy and paste this Meta tag on all your pages within the head tag section. If you are using blogger, open your template and look for the head tag, paste after this tag. Once you save in Blogger, it will be published on all your pages. Meta tag method is your best if you are using templates.

A second method is the HTML method. If you want to use this method, create an html file and copy a code generated by your webmaster tool into the file. This html file should be saved at the highest level in your directory structure. For example, if your web address is www.mywebsite.com, your authentication file should be at www.mywebsite.com/erk3990.html assuming that the name of the file is erk3990.html. Note that some search engines’ webmaster tool will tell you the name you must give to your authentication file.

HTML method is best when you are not using a template as it saves you from having to paste a meta code on every page, just create a page and save it in your highest directory and the search engine will find it their and authenticate your website.

Once you authenticate your website, in a couple of weeks you will start receiving useful information about your website from your webmaster tool. A visit every two weeks is okay initially, weekly visits are necessary once a few pages have been indexed on your website. Once your website is stable, generating daily and consistent traffic, you should visit webmaster tool whenever, you are online.

Maintaining and managing your website with webmaster tools is all about visiting it regularly and observing if there are any issues with your website. Errors on your website should be handled promptly. For example, if your webmaster tool informs you of a missing page on your site, you should restore the missing page on your website or remove links to such pages from your other pages.

Some Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Central

Yahoo Site Explorer

Bing Webmaster