Add Your Site to Google Search Console
First, visit the Google Search Console website and then click the Start Now button to continue.
Next, you need to sign in with your Google / Gmail account.
After logging in, you will be prompted to enter your website URL.
There are two methods available for site verification: Domain name or URL prefix. We recommend the URL prefix method as it is more flexible.
Note that Google considers HTTP and HTTPS as two different protocols. Again, it considers https://www.bymeoman.com and https://bymeoman.com as two different websites.
You need to enter the website URL used by WordPress. If you’re not sure, there’s an easy way to find the exact URL you need to enter. Login to your WordPress admin area and go to Settings » General page. Here you will see your website URL in the site address field.
Copy your site address from WordPress settings page
After entering your website address in the Google webmaster tools setup wizard, click the ‘Continue’ button to proceed to the next step.
Now you will be asked to verify the ownership of your website. There are several ways to do this and we will show the HTML tag method because it is the easiest.
Click the HTML tag to expand it and then copy the code inside.
Now you need to add this Google site verification meta tag to WordPress so that Google can verify that you are the owner of the website.
You need to edit the header.php file in your WordPress theme and add it just above the code tag. There are tutorials on this.However, we do not recommend this method as the HTML tag will be lost if you update or change your theme.
Google regularly checks the HTML tag and disables your access to site data in the search console if it can’t find the validation tag.
Check Your Ownership Is Verified
To make sure Google can verify your ownership, do the following:
- First you need to install and activate the Insert Headers and Footers plugin.
- After enabling it, go to Settings » Insert Headers and Footers page and paste the Google HTML tag code you copied earlier into the scripts box in the plugin.
Add HTML validation tag to site header
Don’t forget to click the “Save” button to save your changes.
You can now go back to the Google Search Console settings and click the ‘Verify’ button.
Google Search Console will now look for the HTML tag in your website code and show you a message.
