I’ve bought unlimited developer’s licenses for all three of Brian Gardner’s WP theme companies starting with “Revolution”. I build a business around these themes and the best in industry support that StudioPress is world famous for.
Their top of the line product is a WordPress framework called Genesis. When you use Genesis, you have a multitude of “child theme” options that allows WordPress and Genesis to be continuously updated without having a negative impact on your child theme. Genesis has a lot of features built in that are not native to basic WordPress installations, and the Genesis control panel add-on to the WordPress Dashboard is one of those features.
The Genesis control panel makes life easy for users that want to add their sites to Google WebMaster Tools. When you have a verified website in “Tools” you can access Google Analytics and Google Places. All this is free for now but many in the industry have suggested these excellent tools may not be free in the future. In any case I would highly recommend you use them as they provide a lot of SEO data that otherwise would cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to get with a 3rd party option.
Here is the YouTube version of the instructional video:
Click below to get the Screencast version of the instructional video:
Google Verify Process for StudioPress Genesis Users
To login to Google WebMaster Tools, I usually start by logging into Gmail.
From there, I pick the account pulldown menu and choose “account settings”. This gets me to my main Google Accounts screen.
From there I can pick “WebMaster Tools”.
WebMaster Tools will allow me to choose an option “add a site” and then I can type in the website URL.
From there Tools will offer several methods to verify:
- create an ascii HTML file and upload it to your website root folder via FTP or SFTP.
- add a meta tag
- do a DNS change and add a text field they supply
- add Google Analytics
StudioPress Genesis users will go to the “alternate methods” screen and pick “add a meta tag” which will look something like this:
<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”2Ec_TpSNzlAj3TmVTjOqG6IbtQPW7r489pZpDYrpqTA” />
OK at this point login to your WordPress website and from the main Dashboard pick the “Genesis” option to get to the Genesis Control Panel.
On the lower right corner of the screen there will be options for “Header / Footer Scripts” and the top section there is to add tags and links to the wp_head section. That’s where we paste the verification string… the “meta tag”. Then we go to the bottom of the page and do a save.
Mac users can hold down the command key and PC users can hold the control key and you can click on the website name at the top of the WordPress Dashboard to open a new window with the website at it’s homepage. From there using FireFox, you can do a View / Page Source to get under the hood and look at the HTML code that makes up the page. From there I go back to the browser menu bar and choose Edit / Find. I look for the string meta and I keep clicking the next button until I get to the “google-site-verification” string we saw earlier.
<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”2Ec_TpSNzlAj3TmVTjOqG6IbtQPW7r489pZpDYrpqTA” />
OK from this point we know the meta tag is in the homepage under the hood in the HTML and we can go back to WebMaster Tools and click the botton that says “verify”. Google will not give us a fancy message that tells us the verification worked, but they will let us immediately into the account to work with the data.
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