Whether you have a blog or a website, you definitely want to tell Google that it’s yours!  How do you do that?  Google Webmaster Tools.

Now that you know how to FTP to your site, it will take you about five minutes to claim your site with Google Webmaster Tools.  The benefits are simple but helpful.  You can easily see:

• The top google searches that led people to you
• A complete list of external links
• All broken links that Google finds as it crawls
• The keywords that Google views as significant

In addition, Google will notify you on the Webmaster Tools dashboard of any errors that they have found while they were attempting to access your site.

To claim your site, visit Google Webmaster Tools and sign in or register with your Google account.

Click “Add a Site”

Input your website and hit continue, you will be taken to the “Verify Ownership” screen.  Select “Upload an HTML file”.

You will be given a link to a file to download.  Simply download that and use your nifty CoreFTP (or other) program to upload it to the root of your site.  If you are logged in to Core FTP, navigate your left window to where your file is downloaded, and your right window to your domain.  Select the file on the left, and click the right arrow to copy it to your server.

Voila!  Hit the “Verify” button and your domain is now “yours” in Google’s eyes.  In a few days you should be able to log in and see all of the wonderful information above!  Easy peasy, right?