Site Verification Is Necessity No. 1

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you want maximum search engine optimization benefits (pick a search engine) then you need to go through the small trouble of verifying your website. It isn’t hard, doesn’t take long, and is absolutely necessary to ensure that the search engines recognize ownership and get you indexed as quickly as possible.

Here’s the short run on how to verify your site at each of the three major search engines:

Google – First, log in to Google Webmaster Central (if you don’t have an account you’ll have to create one). If you have more than one site you’ll have to pick the site you want to verify and click Verify next to that site. Choose a verification method (meta tag or upload HTML file). Adding the meta tag is easiest if you know how to do that. Simply copy the meta tag and insert it into the Head part of your website code then re-upload your web page. Google will do the rest. If you want choose instead to upload the HTML file, all you have to do is create the file with the file name that Google suggests and upload it using FTP. There doesn’t need to be any contents in the file. Google only cares that the file exists and wants to know where to find it. Really simple.

Yahoo! – Yahoo! calls this process authentication, but it does the same thing as Google’s verification process. Create a Site Explorer account and log in. Find the My SiteS box and enter your URL. Click the button that reads Add My Site. Click the Authenticate button next to the website you want to authenticate. Yahoo! also has two options, like Google: Upload a file or authentication by meta tag. If you choose to upload the file you’ll have to download the authentication key. Do that then insert it into your page and upload the page. Go back into Site Explorer and click the Ready To Authenticate button. To authenticate by meta tag, copy the meta tag that Yahoo! offers and paste it into the Head of your HTML document and upload the page to your server. Go back to Site Explorer and click Ready To Authenticate. Easy as pie.

MSN – Sign in to Webmaster Central. Again, you’ll be given two options – download and upload the verification file or meta tag verification. Pick your option and follow instructions. If you choose to download the verification file, don’t alter it. Just upload it to your root directory and that’s it. If you choose to use the meta tag code that MSN Live offers, do as you did with Google and Yahoo! and insert it into your HTML document in the Head section then re-upload the page to your server. Done. NOTE: You may need to add your site to the list and if so just follow the directions to do so. It’s also easy.

Website verification is a simple but necessary step you must take to be a successful webmaster and this will provide you with excellent search engine optimization information for great a great long term strategy. Don’t leave it out.