Hi All!
I hope y'all are having a good day and being productive. I'm trying to be productive but have been trying to verify a site with Google so I can access the Webmaster tools and such and it has now been over an hour and I still haven't accomplished my task. It's the little things like this that can really waste your time and hang you up.

The quest so far....
So, I'm in Google and they give me an html file to download to my server. I go to the server and there is only an upload button - no download. There is a root directory but no home page where at one point I was told to download it to. So, ok, I'll bite...I go to upload and it says 0 file found and does not give me any options - so I'm guessing I got this ass backwards as my grandma used to say.

So now what? I just try to add the file and it has exactly 0 bytes and Google is insisting I'm an idiot. So now I try 'alternate methods' as Google suggests. I use a meta tag and it tells me to place it before the end of the head tag. Now we all know most of the tags say and such in WPE so I put it in just before . Nada...it's now telling me that I didn't put it in the right place. So I create a and and put the meta tag between them. Nope again! Google verification again tells me that I didn't put it in the right place. I am very frustrated.

This glitchy process is preventing me from my real task and that is to find out if my site is even indexed properly and figuring out more ways to optimize it.

All this is an attempt to find out why the site is not coming up in Google Places or Google + Local. It's for a local client and I need to find this out asap. I submitted the site and filled out all the profile stuff long ago for local placement but we're just not there yet -- altho we are on page one just below the local results :) - Now to get in the local results!!!

It's been said that knowing more than my clients makes me somewhat of an expert. I don't feel like one right now. Google XML sitemaps has given me similar headaches to which I responded by adding a plug-in for an XML sitemap that wasn't thru Google. It seemed to work but I couldn't really tell you if it really is working or not. I don't know how to tell.

Any advice or help from y'all would be greatly appreciated. I'm good at some things but these kinds of things are not my forte.

Thanks for listening to my rant.
Renni