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Are you Google-Friendly?

By: Heidi Bautista

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Is it possible to ensure that Google finds, crawls, and indexes your site? Well, no, there's no way to guarantee your site will be included in Google's index but you can make your site Google-friendly, thus improving your chances.

Google even provides the guidelines and tools. This article provides an overview of Google's Webmaster Tools and how you can use them to increase your Google-friendliness and in the process, hopefully, increase your ranking in the search results.

You can learn more about the Webmaster Tools in Google Code.

To actually take advantage of these tools you have to have an account. It's free (and I'm not getting spammed as a result of having signed up). Once you have an account you can use the webmaster tools on any website you have access to.

Getting Started

Get started by logging into your Google account. The first thing you have to do is tell Google which domains you care about.

  1. Click the Webmaster Tools link under My Services on your Accounts page. Use the Add Site textbox to add to your list of sites.
  2. Google wants to ensure that only site owners are allowed to use the tools. Therefore you have to verify that you're the site owner. You can choose to either:
    • Add a meta tag to the site's home page, or
    • Upload a specific HTML file to a specific location in the site.
  3. After adding the meta tag or uploading the specified file click the Verify button.

Now you're all set to start using the webmaster tools.

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Keywords
Google, search, optimize, optimization, ranking, sitemap, http handler, GSitemap.ashx, webmaster tools