Google’s Webmaster Tools is one of the best free sources to find out what is going on with your website. If you aren’t verifying your sites with Webmaster Tools, you really should start. The problem that some online marketers find is that they don’t know what to do with all the information that Google WT provides. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your webmaster tools.
- Make sure you set your site defaults!- In the site defaults section make sure to set a preferred domain for your site (with or without the “www”). It doesn’t make a difference which version you choose, but it is beneficial to select one or the other. If your site focuses on users in one geographical region, you can also select a geographic target. This will help to boost your rankings for that area, but it will come at the expense of your rankings for users from other areas. Only use the geographic target option if you are only targeting users from one area.
- Search Query Stats-Find out which searches most often show your site. This can be very useful in helping you choose keywords and phrases to target. If you site is ranking pretty well for a certain keyword, you might want to use SEO to target that word and move up the rankings even further. This section will also show you what searches actually result in someone clicking through to your site.
- Check your backlinks- The sitelinks section of WT will show you how many external links to your website Google has found. You will usually find that Google knows about many more links than it actually shows if you use the link: search operator. Sitelinks gives you a better estimate of how many backlinks your site actually has.
- Find those errors!- The web crawl errors section will quickly show you if you have broken links in your sitemap or on your website. It is very important to correct these quickly as failing to do so can harm your Google rankings. This section will also show you if Google is being blocked from viewing important pages of your site by the robots.txt file.
These are only a few of the great bits of information that you will find about your site in Google Webmaster Tools. The tools are completely free and are very useful, so be sure not to waste this resource.
