In my previous post on How to do SEO, I talked about the basic stuff that you need to work on in order to kick start SEO for your website.

Let’s assume you have started or have completed almost all the basic stuff that I mentioned in my previous report. Some of the SEO work is ongoing in nature, such as getting links, adding content etc. SEO is a continuous process; you will need to consistently work on getting links, adding relevant content, and optimizing the content for SEO.

In today’s post of “How to do SEO part II”, I will take up Google Webmaster tools in detail. If you have a Google account, you can register for Google webmaster account using that account itself.

There are two things you will need to do:

A) Add your site.
This is fairly simple. Just click on the “Add a site” button and type in your site’s url.

B. Verify your site
Unless you verify your site, you won’t be able to access reports that Google webmaster tools provides you regarding crawl errors, search queries, links to your site, sitemaps etc.

Here is the step by step instruction from Google regarding site verification –

1. Download this HTML verification file. [googlverificationfile.html]
2. Upload the file to http://www.yoursite.com/
3. Confirm successful upload by visiting
http://www.yoursite.com/googlverificationfile.html in your browser.
4. Click Verify below –  To stay verified, don’t remove the HTML file, even after verification succeeds.

You will also need to upload the XML sitemap for your site. Here is a link where Google explains in detail about the benefits of an Xml sitemap-
https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184&hl=en
To generate your XML sitemap, go to -www.xml-sitemaps.com
Once you have the sitemap, log in to webmaster tools account and submit the XML sitemap. You will find the link under the site configuration section shown below: –

Try out the Google webmaster tool. You will benefit from the information you receive on crawl errors, links from other site, website ranking status for keywords that are relevant for your site, and much more.