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WordPress.com provides you with built-in stats that give you lots of information about your traffic, but if you’re a stats junky and you can’t get enough info about how people are finding your site, some search engines and social sites offer additional “webmaster tools.”

For example, Google’s webmaster tools will give you some additional statistical data about your traffic, such as how many people are arriving at your site through Google queries, what part of the world your traffic is from, and how many visitors landed on each specific post or page. It will also show you the total number of individual URLs on your site that have been indexed by Google, which search keywords are most significant for your site, and other information about how Google is indexing your site.

Please note that verifying your site in order to use the webmaster tools is not necessary in order for your site to be indexed with Google, Bing, or any other search engine. WordPress.com takes care of indexing your site and of all necessary SEO for you without your having to do anything at all (other than blog)! This is just an extra step you can take if you’d like to gather some additional information on your site traffic that might be of interest to you.

For most sites, in order to verify your site for webmaster tools, you normally need to add a hidden “meta tag” to your page. Since you can’t edit the theme files of your site on WordPress.com, we provide additional tools to make this easier.

If you have multiple domain names pointing to the same site, we recommend verifying the primary domain.

All of the Website Verification Services can be accessed via your Tools→Available Tools screen.

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Here are instructions for how to verify your WordPress.com site with each service:

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Google Webmaster Tools

  1. Log in to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ with your Google account.
  2. Enter your blog address (without http:// or https:// in front)
  3. Click the Add a Site button
  4. You will be presented with several verification methods. Choose the Alternate Methods tab.
  5. Select the option: HTML tag
  6. Copy the content value of the meta tag. You’ll see some HTML like this:
    <meta name="google-site-verification" content="rc2RXSkjV5rz9P2s2hTwdDsnwTu4tD-gmruKUrqBGjs" />
  7. Copy the content value by itself. In the example above, you will only copy: rc2RXSkjV5rz9P2s2hTwdDsnwTu4tD-gmruKUrqBGjs
  8. Leave the verification page open and go to your blog dashboard (in a new tab/window).
  9. Open the Tools → Available Tools Page and paste the content value in the Google Webmaster Tools field under the Website Verification Services header.
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  10. Click on Save Changes.
  11. Go back to the verification page and click Verify.