How to setup Google Search Console for your WordPress blog and get the most out of this Free Google service to improve and boost your website search engine results.

In today’s article, we are about to share on how to setup Google Search Console for your WordPress blog. For the few of you who doesn’t know yet on how to do the basic setup for the Search Console, we intentionally wrote this setup guide to help you get started.

Although this setup guide that we wrote is for WordPress, it can also be the same process when integrating to other platform or Content Management Systems and or even with your static HTML website.

Search Console

The very first requirement that you need is to secure a gmail account. Without it, everything is not possible to acquire and take advantage of this amazing Google service.

From then, we want you to start navigating to Google Search Console page. Take note that every time you add a domain in the console for the first time you should always need to verify its domain ownership first before it can be integrated and add more variants of your domain in the webmaster tools.

Adding A Website Property

Before we proceed adding properties, we want you to understand the two (2) different variants or version of your domain name. Have a look in the examples below.

HTTP (non-www and www) —Without SSL Certificate

1. http://domain.com
2. http://www.domain.com

HTTPS (non-www and www) —With SSL Certificate  

1. https://domain.com
2. https://www.domain.com

Looks a little bit confusing right? Okay, lets dig a little deeper. This is how we should go about these two (2) variants mentioned above namely the HTTP and HTTPS in our property console.

• If your domain that you wish to integrate does not have an SSL certificate installed you may only add the HTTP variant as your property.

1. http://domain.com
2. http://www.domain.com

• If your domain has SSL certificate installed add the two variants ( HTTP and HTTPS ) as property in your search console.

1. http://domain.com
2. http://www.domain.com
3. https://domain.com
4. https://www.domain.com

By now, you should be able to identify on which set of variant you should be adding in your search console that is required for your domain.

In addition, just in case you do not know how to add a property on your Google search console you may want to visit search console help page on how to add a website property.

Verifying Domain Ownership

Google Search Console ultimately provides us five (5) options to verify your domain ownership and we will lists them accordingly for reference purposes.

1. HTML file upload (Upload an HTML file to your site.)
2. HTML tag (Add a meta tag to your site’s home page.)
3. Domain name provider (Sign in to your domain name provider.)
4. Google Tag Manager (Use your Google Tag Manager account.)
5. Google Analytics (Use your Google Analytics account.)

From the lists above, you do not need to learn implement all 5 options as they will serve the same purpose. Therefore, we only need to select one. As for this lesson, we prefer to use HTML file upload and HTML tag. While both options are very convenient and are the simplest form to verify your domain ownership in Google Search Console.

Now, for this example we will choose the HTML tag domain ownership verification method. We use this option every now and then because its easy as copy and pasting a line of code.

It’s time for us to add your very first domain in your Console. Carefully follow the steps provided in the illustration below:

Right after clicking on the ADD A PROPERTY button, you will be redirected to another page as seen below:

Now you already know how to add your properties in Console page you should be seeing something like in the screenshot when we have successfully filled in some properties in your webmaster tools.

Now you already have a general idea lets jump in adding your first property in your Google Search Console.

Creating A Property Set

However, in the above procedure we have successfully added all four variants of a single website. Now, what if you have three (3) or more websites attached in your webmaster tools  account? For example maybe you have a website that has different country code domains such .ca, .com.au, .eu and each individual domain will have atleast four (4) variants right? which is the http and https and the non-www and www version.

So, if you want to have something like an organize group on the individual set of domains that you have in your account. All you have to do is to repeat the same process as above and follow the instructions below.

• click on the create set button.
• name your set accordingly
• start adding members in your set (individual variants of the domain property)
• click save button

Note:  Repeat the whole process until you have successfully added all four (4) variants into a single set or group.

What happens next is that you will now have a much simpler version of Search Console and more details in search analytics for the group itself.

Conclusion

We have just successfully added our first set of domains. Basically, A property set shows aggregate data for all its member properties it is a way of organizing your Console properties if you have more than one website integrated in your Google Search Console account which allows you to group up to 200 property sets. However, we still need to give it some time fetch all the data information to be displayed on your new property set.

After reading all this guide we hope that you have learned something new. Now, it’s time for you to decide which method you are going to use either if you are only up with only website then you may ignore creating a set method yet, if you are hosting several website in your Console its good to group individual properties by creating a set.