Google webmaster tools: an extra promotion tool for your website
Handmade jewellery market is probably one of the most crowded online markets. Because so many people love making jewellery. If you offer jewellery for sale on your own website, how can you promote it to potential buyers?
Google is your friend. And it works both ways. Not only it helps you to find answers to your queries. But it also helps you by providing your answers to other people’s queries.
Google helps website owners by collecting data about their websites, indexing the data and offering them to search engine users. The same data can be used by the website owners who want to know how their website performs, what readers are looking for or looking at, and lots more. This data is available to in something called Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Webmaster Tools is a free service from Google that helps you monitor and improve your website’s search engine ranking results.
The first step to use these great tools is to open a Google merchant account. But this is only a beginning of the story…
I am not going to copy paste the complete tutorial here, google’s instructions are clear enough. I just want to share some some points where I experienced difficulties as a DIY-web marketer.
Verify and claim your site URL
Google offers various methods for verifying your domain: by adding a meta tag to your home page, uploading an HTML file to your server, verifying via a domain name provider or by using a google analytics code.
I am just a DIY…without any IT background whatsoever. The first two options which seemed easiest to me have been tried, without any result. I simply could not find my home page in my WP website structure and could not upload any HTML file to my server.
Then came this magic bullet… from my DH. Verifying your site is actually very simple. Since my website uses this awesome WP plugin WP SEO by Yoast, there is an option under SEO->Google Webmaster Tools. You just take the unique code from Google Webmaster, paste it into this field, click…and here we go. The site URL is verified. A miracle, isn’t it?
After verification you have to claim your website in Google Merchant Center. That is relatively easy. It is very important to name your website URL correctly, starting with with either http:// or https://. Not with a www.! Providing a wrong URL name was the reason that this step took me extra time.
And then the most challenging part of Google webmaster tools begins – creating and uploading your product data
**to be continued***
Leave a Reply