How to Properly Add Your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console is known as Google webmaster tools. In this tutorial, I will show you how to add your site to Google Search Console and get the most out of it for your website.

Add a Property

Go to Google Search Console home page. Login with your Google account. Then click the Add a property button on the upper-right corner.

Type your site URL. Specify your site URL exactly as it appears in the browser address bar. If it has trailing slash, you must include the trailng slash. If your site is HTTPS enabled, first add the http version and then later add the https version. Click Continue.

Select a method to verify that you are the owner this domain.

Once the verfication is completed, your site is added to Google Search Console.

Improve the Search Presence of Your Site

After the verification process, you will receive a message in Search Console. In that message, you are told to complete 6 steps. They are as follows:

1. Add all your website versions
2. Select your preferred version
3. Select target country
4. Share access with co-workers
5. Sumbit a sitemap
6. Learn how to work with Search Console

The 1st, 2nd and 5th step must be done by every webmaster and I will go over these steps below. The other steps are optional depending on your situation.

Add all your website versions

You must add all versions of your site to Google Search Console. If your site supports https, then you must add the following versions of your site.

• http://example.com
• http://www.example.com
• https://example.com
• https://www.example.com

If your site don’t support https, then just add the first two versions.

Preferred Domain

Preferred domain is also called canonical domain. It’s the version that you want used for your site in search results. For example, my preferred domain is https://www.linuxbabe.com.

Once you’ve set your preferred domain, it’s recommended that you use 301 permanent redirect to redirect traffic to your preferred domain so that other search engines and visitors can also know your preferred domain. For instance, My preferred domain is https://www.linuxbabe.com, so when people visit my site using the following URL:

• http://www.linuxbabe.com
• http://linuxbabe.com
• https://linuxbabe.com

They will be redirected to https://www.linuxbabe.com.

If you use Linux or OS X, you can check your 301 redirect using curl command.

[matrix@arch ~]$ curl -I https://linuxbabe.com
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2016 03:39:52 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge
Location: https://www.linuxbabe.com/
CF-RAY: 26c1e99690ae2300-LAX

As you can see, https://linuxbabe.com had been permanently moved to https://www.linuxbabe.com. If I check my other two non-preferred domain, they are also permanently moved to my preferred domain.

Sumbit a sitemap

A sitemap is a xml file that shows your site structure. It plays a very important role for Google to know your site structure and help Googlebot easily crawl your site. You can generate a xml sitemap for your WordPress site using a plugin called Google XML Sitemap.