Are you familiar with Google Webmaster Tools?
If you have a website that you are hoping to attract people to, then you should be.
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a free set of tools provided by Google to help you understand how Google is indexing your website.
GWT can tell you if there are problems with your site, how Google sees your site, what search terms are directing people to our site, and who is linking to your website, as well as a lot more.
The best way to get non-paid traffic to your site is with organic search through Google. In order to make informed decisions about how to optimize your website for search, you need to set up a Google Webmaster Tools account.
Once you have done that, you can link it to your Google Analytics account (if you have one), and you will get all kinds of information about your site and your visitors that you can use to optimize your website.
Creating a Google Webmaster Account
The first thing you need to do is to create a GWT account. You can do that from here. If you already have a Google account of any kind, then the sign up process is pretty straight forward.
Once you have set up an account, the next step is to add your website. Google will then want you to verify that you own the website.
Google gives you a number of options to validate your website. The three easiest are:
- Add a small code snippet to the HTML of your website’s home page, and then publish the page to your webhost – GWT gives you code to place into the header of the page. Once you publish the page to your webhost, Google will check for it and then verify the account.
- Publish an HTML file to your webhost – GWT will give you a full HTML page. Upload this page to the root directory of your webhost. Again, GWT will check for the page and verify your account.
- Link your Google Analytics Account to your new GWT account – If you already have a Google Analytics Account, Google Analytics will give you a code to verify your GWT account.
Once you have gone through the verification process be aware that it can take a few hours for GWT to get data for your website.
Search Console
Along the top of the Search Console the first thing you will see are any important messages from Google. You should check these out first.
If Google has an issue with your website, such as bad back-links, or if your site is not mobile friendly, then this could adversely affect your rankings. All issue you will want to address soon.
Settings
Selecting your preferred domain name is something you will want to do, and this can be done under the Setting menu. This is important because http://yourdomain.com vs. http://www.yourdomain.com are different.
Either one works. However, you need to be consistent with this setting and what you use when you are linking to page within your site, or when you get people to link to your site. The reason is that Google sees these as two different links, which can affect your search rankings.
Current Status
Crawl Errors
The crawl errors section will show you if there any problems that relate to your site on the web or on a mobile phone. The most common error that you’ll see is a 404 error, which means Google’s search bot can’t find that page.
Search Analytics
One of the most useful pieces of information you can get from GWT is insight into the keywords and phrases you are ranking for. That is, which terms and phrases are bringing you the most traffic.
You may be surprised to find that people are visiting your site after your site ranks for words or phrases you never suspected would generate leads.
This goes back to the core of how Google works – the best way to increase your Google ranking is to get more sites to link to you.
Sitemaps
Google does not always find all your website’s pages. Submitting a sitemap to GWT will help Google see the pages on your website so it can index them. If you don’t submit a sitemap Google may not index all of the pages on your site, which means you won’t get as much traffic.
You can use XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap. All you have to do is enter in your URL of your homepage and click ‘start’. You will then need to upload the sitemap file to your webhost.
The Dashboard
The dashboard set of tools down the left navigation bar provides you with an overview of how your site is being seen by Google.
Everything from Search Appearance, what keywords you are ranking for, to how much traffic you are getting.
You also get to see if the Google search bot is experiencing any crawl errors when indexing your website, the number of sites linking to yours, and how many pages Google has listed.
Conclusion
Google Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of information on how your website is doing. If you are at all interested in how well you website is ranking, if you are interested in knowing where your website might be broken, or where there is room for improvement, the Google Webmaster Tools should be an essential part of your tool kit.
And best of all, it is free!
Do you use Google Webmaster Tools? What information do you find the most useful?
