How To Start a Blog for Free on WordPress com

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Like most bloggers in the blogosphere, my primary focus is to get more Google juice.

I don’t care much about Yahoo, Bing, or anything of the other lesser popular search engines.

  • There is Google Search, and there’s everything else.

Naturally, I’m concerned about how my blog gets crawled by Google and about what content gets indexed by Google.

Google’s Webmaster Tool tells me the inside story of how users find my website through Google. In my opinion, the Search Console Tool is like an ECG that displays the heart beat of internet traffic – Google being the heart.


To be able to use this free service by Google for your website, you need to prove to them that you are the owner of your website.

Now here’s the question:

  • How do you verify your self-hosted WordPress blog with the Google Webmaster Tool?

Google lets you verify ownership of a website using one of three methods:

  1. Meta tag.
  2. Upload an HTML file.
  3. DNS Verification.

This question has been answered multiple times before. Let me answer it again, with the bonus of showing you the cleanest way possible.

Google Webmaster Tool verification methods:

1. FTP an HTML file

The disadvantage of this method is that you will need an FTP client installed on your computer.

We WordPress bloggers don’t use FTP frequently. We may use an FTP client one time to install WordPress.

But we use the WordPress admin dashboard to do every uploading related task such as uploading a picture, or a theme, or a plugin.

2. Add a meta tag to header file

You can follow the steps shown by Don Campbell in this video and add a meta tag to the header.php file.

How To Set Up A WordPress Blog [Checklist]

The disadvantage of this method is that you have to repeat this step each time you change your theme.

Furthermore, incorrect changes done to the theme’s header file may crash your blog.

Face it, who wants to meddle with code and risk screwing up a blog that was working properly.

3. Use All In One SEO Pack plugin 

  • This the cleanest method to verify ownership.

Download and install the WordPress plugin — All In One SEO Pack.

Once you are done with the installation, all you have to do is:

  1. Go to WordPress Admin -> Settings -> All In One SEO
  2. Paste the meta code into the text area called “Additional Home Headers”.
  3. Go to the “Verify Ownership” page in Google’s Webmaster Tool and click on the “Verify” button.

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Additional Home Headers section in All In One SEO plugin

Obviously, I’m biased and lean towards this method. So the disadvantages shall not be mentioned…

The best part of using the All In One SEO plugin is some of the other magical features offered by this plugin that can help you tweak your SEO with minimal effort.

Once you are done with the site verification, it’s time to generate your sitemap using the Google XML sitemap plugin.

Also read:

  • How To Submit Sitemap To Google
  • How To Submit Sitemap To Bing
  • How To Index Your Website Within 24 hours In Every Search Engine

Comment and let us know how you verified your WordPress blog with Google’s Search Console Tool.

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