Enabling Google Search Console For Websites

What is Google Search Console?

As stated on Wikipedia, - "Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. As of May 20, 2015, Google rebranded Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console."

Why use Search Console?

As listed by Google, below are the most important uses of Google Search Console.

• Make sure that Google can access your content.
• Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don't want shown in search results.
• Create and monitor content that delivers visually engaging search results.
• Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance.
• Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean.

So now, we will look how to enable Google Search Console for our websites step-by-step!

Step 1 

Open Google Search, type "Google Webmaster", and click "Search" button. You will get the below results.



Open the first link from the results.

Step 2

Click on the "Search Console" button on the page.



Step 3

Now, you will be redirected to the Google Account Login page. Enter your email id and password and click "Sign in". If you don't have a Google account, create one here.



Step 4 

After Signing in, you will be redirected to Search Console page. Enter the URL of site that you want to enable Search Console and press "ADD A PROPERTY" button.



Step 5

Now, you need to verify the ownership of your website.

There is a recommended way of logging in to your Host Server and doing the steps listed in the page.



There are also some alternative methods available for the same which is much simpler than the recommended methods.

Step 6 

There are 4 alternative methods, out of which I prefer the first one. That is, downloading a Html verification file and uploading it into root of your website.



Step 7 

Once verified your website, tick "I'm not a robot" captcha and press "VERIFY" button.



Step 8 

Congratulations! You have successfully verified ownership of your website! Press "Continue".



Step 9

Now, you will be redirected to the dashboard of Search Console. Here, you will get various stats of your websites



Step 10 

You will have a lot of menus in the left side of the page which will be showing search analytics and crawl errors in your website.



Step 11 

One of the important uses of search console is to fix crawl errors of your website.

Click "Crawl > Crawl Errors" to explore the crawl errors in your website. You can fix teh errors and click "MARK AS FIXED" to resolve the same.



From the next time onwards, when we login to Search Console, we can see a screen having our website name like below


Just click on the website URL and you will be redirected to search the console page of a particular website.

We can enable Search Console for multiple websites from a single account. Just make use of Search Console and make your website's search performance much better.

Conclusion

In this article, we have learned how to enable Google Search Console for websites.

Hope this will be helpful.