How to gather some additional information on your site traffic (e.g. WordPress one) and help search engines to index it

If you have a site it can be useful to have information on its traffic and possibly help spiders to index it. I already wrote a post on How to submit the URL of a site to main search engines, but you can do something more …

Every search engine have in fact a specific site for webmasters and here you can both verify your site in order to receive traffic information and provide your sitemap, usually an XML file made available in your domain.

In case you have a WordPress site, because a WordPress user has not access to all the files of his domain but he can only manage his posts, the only way to get a site verification by a is to ask the there is to ask for a meta-tag to some spider providers. Then in WordPress there is a Webmaster Tools section where you can insert that meta-tag provided by Google (Google Search Console), Bing ( Bing Webmaster Center), Pinterest (Pinterest Site Verification), Yandex (Yandex.Webmaster). That section can be reached both in the new dashboard and in the old one:

[P.S. 9/6/2021 – The path to Site verification services (IT: Servizi di verifica del sito) now changed to Tools -> Marketing and go into Traffic tab): see also Strumenti per webmaster – Supporto – WordPress.com

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Old dashboard: *Tools -> Available Tools*

To get the meta-tag from Google you have to go to http://g.co/SearchConsole with your Google account: everything is well explained in a WordPress tutorial but I think that the following screenshots should be sufficient to complete the all procedure for all the providers.

Each time you have to write the URL of your site, ask the provider for a meta-tag, copy it in the appropriate WordPress field (and save that insertion!), then go back to that provider and ask it to verify your site.

Then for each provider it is also convenient to write the sitemap of your site that is an XML file that WordPress makes available at yoursitename/sitemap.xml.

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Google (Google Search Console)

[9/6/2021 update – Note that step 5^II must be done after having inserted the copied google-site-verification code in the WordPress site