Now that your website is up, consider placing Google ads on your site to generate some extra income. First, you will need to submit an online application to Google, providing details about your website. Once your website has been approved, you will need to authenticate your website with Google.
Authenticate Website
After signing in to your account, click on the Webmaster Tools icon, then access the Site Authentication feature. You must provide your website domain name/URL (example: http://www.mywebsite.com). A domain name is included in most web hosting plans. You should own your domain name because you will need to have administrative authority for the domain in order to register for some internet programs and services. For example, you may need to have administrative authority in order to insert html codes into your web pages.
The next step is to verify your website. Google gives you two options to verify your website; META and HTML. Choose the verification method that you would like to use. I chose to verify my website by copying and pasting a meta tag, which Google provided, into my website. Meta tags provide search engines with information about your website. This meta tag is added to the header file of your homepage. Follow the instructions of your web host on how to add the meta tag to the header file. Once the meta tag has been pasted into your homepage, click verify.
Submit Sitemap
Once your site is verified, you must submit a sitemap for your website. Sitemaps give search engines information about your site. Google offers several options for creating a sitemap. If you created and verified you website using Google Sites, Google automatically created a sitemap for your site. You will just need to follow Google’s instructions on how to submit it. Google also has a sitemap generator. I chose to submit a sitemap based on a text file, because this was the easiest method for me. I did this by creating a text file containing my website URLs. To do this you must list one URL per line. For example:
http://www.mywebsite.com/index.html
http://www.mywebsite.com/aboutus.html
http://www.mywebsite.com/contactus.html
To save the file, you must specify UTF-8 encoding in the “save as” dialog box. Name the file sitemap (sitemap.txt), and upload it to the highest directory in your site contents. Follow the instructions on working with files and folders that is provided by your web host. Now that you’ve created this file, you can submit it to Google as a sitemap. Google will reflect the sitemap file as Sitemap.txt (with a capital “S”).
Submit Robots File
Next, you must submit a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file restricts access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web. If you want search engines to index everything on your site, then you may need to edit your robots.txt file to allow this to happen. You must allow Google to crawl your website so that it can index your pages into its search engine. The following is a sample robots.txt file that allows Google to crawl your site:
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
User-Agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /
Google will help you to generate and edit the robots.txt file. Like the sitemap, you will also need to upload the robots.txt file to the highest directory in your site contents.
If there are problems with any of the above steps, Google provides you with an explanation of the problem. You can also check the status of the authentication process by logging in to your Google account, and clicking on Webmaster Tools.
Once your site has been authenticated, you are ready to place Google ads on your site. The topic of my next blog will discuss placing ads in a website.
