Naturally you want to get indexed by Google and direct some of that traffic to your blog but your using WordPress.com?

The best way to do this is to submit your sitemap.xml.  See sitemaps.org for more info on sitemap.xml, in short it helps a search engine find all the pages in your site and index them usually within about 3-4days in my experience. Ranking will depend on a number of factors such as number of inbound links which will be covered in another post.

First you need a Google account, when signed into Google  open up ‘My Account’ top right hand corner. Find ‘Webmaster Tools’ near the bottom of the ‘My Products’ list you may need to click edit to find it.  Once in Webmaster Tools add your domain to the dashboard ‘username.wordpress.com‘ click Sitemaps and we want to add your sitemap.xml. This file is located at username.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml so just type in sitemap.xml and then click add.

Next you will be asked to verify the sitemap upload in one of 2 ways adding a meta tag (which you cant do in wordpress.com) or by uploading a document something like google3581fff9759fxxxx.html. We know we cant upload the document, but to how the ‘pages’ section of wordpress works means we can add a new page with the title google3581fff9759fxxxx.html. So click ‘Add New Pages’ and add you googlexxx.html filename in the title click publish.

Once added go back to Webmaster Tools add click the verify button.

When you have verified you can delete the googlexxxx.html file or set it to a draft see note below why. You will now have full access to Webmaster Tools and the features it has to offer.

Now you are verified submit your sitemap.xml file to the search engines. Go to http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php this will allow you to submit your sitemap to a few search engines. You will then see how people are reaching your blog through webmaster tools by what search term they are using.

Curious to see if you have been indexed by Google? Then type in ‘site:xxx.wordpress.com‘ in the google search a few days after you have submitted your sitemap.

Please Note:
In future you may see a crawl error or similar error for your verification. This is because it is trying to verify your googlexxx.html file. If this happends just repeat the method above.

Wonder what you can do with the features? Then check out Google Webmaster Tools Tutorial. This post uses Jalja P. Jha post on the gogle webmater tool hack as a source.

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