What is website verification? What's it for? Is it necessary?

These questions and more are common for beginners to ask. While there are other tutorials dealing with this issue, my goal in this tutorial is to utilize the Google Analytics method and give the beginner a thorough step-by-step lesson using screen captures for description rather than video.

What is it and what's it for?

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service provided by Google. It tracks and reports website traffic. To access this service, you must sign up for a Google Analytics account (free), submit your website and verify ownership of the website through Google Search Console.

The reason for the Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) Verification process is so Google can verify you are the owner of the website. Google Analytics gains access to your website through this process in order to provide you with performance data.

Is it necessary?

Submitting your website for Google Analytics to analyze is not necessary but many find this analysis very helpful. It can provide information about errors, traffic, etc. as well as many tools to help with search engine issues. Submitting a Sitemap (covered later) to Google Analytics is also an integral step in giving your website the best possible performance for ranking in searches.

Let's get started!

This process will take about a half an hour, maybe longer as you toggle back and forth to the lesson. You will be opening multiple tabs in your browser for ease in navigation. The major tasks you will accomplish are:

Submitting a website to Google Search Console for verification
Opening a (free) Google Analytics account
Verifying the website
Celebrate your success!

Let's go to the next page and open some tabs.