Google Webmaster Tools
Making the Most of Free Webmaster Services
There are a plethora of webmaster tools on the Internet to help webmasters in bettering their websites in a variety of ways; however, let’s face it, we are going to be mainly concerned with webmaster tools, tips and tricks that help us achieve optimal standings in the search engine results pages, or SERPs, specific to Google. Optimizing your site in general (valid code, page speed, image sizes, etc.) is smart practice and already gives your a head start optimizing for search engine results too. Optimizing your website for Google specific results in mind is pretty much aligned with the general best practices, but of course we want to make sure we go the extra steps suggested by Google, and the best place to ascertain what Google thinks of your website is to utilize the very tools that they provide. The free Google Webmaster Tools is not the end all of all of your efforts; however, being free it fits most any budget and it is a great starting point for learning the tips and tricks of the trade before moving onto a paid platform or service. Even if, maybe especially if, you are using a paid service for your website search engine optimization and online marketing campaign, the free Google Webmasters Tools is a great way to see the efficacy of your expended monies.
Google Webmaster Tools Overview
Don’t allow the extensive amount of data available in the Google webmaster tools scare you off from using the service; it’s not as daunting or difficult as you may think. While there is a lot of data provided, there is also plenty of easy to understand definitions, instructions and support available. One of the key elements to using Google webmaster tools or most any other service is going to rely on your diet of p’s the same as most anything else – you will get out of it what you put in to it; taking the time to read and understand the tools and services will optimize your understanding and ability to use, deploy and exploit the data to your website’s benefit.
Google Webmaster Tools
- How Does Google See My Website? Google provides you data on how they crawl, index and rank your website.
- Search Data Insight; analyze the data Google provides here to find out how and by what keyword terms people are finding your site in the search engine, how many are actually clicking onto your site and more.
- Who Links to My Website? Data provided by Google webmasters tools will show you when Google detects and catalogs who is linking to your website page(s).
- Instant Site Changes Notification. You can submit you sitemaps, feeds and mobile content information to Google via your webmasters tool account; best yet, you can see how many pages Google has indexed into its results.
- Malware Alerts. Google will notify you of any suspicious malicious software or code that may be on your site.
- HTML Suggestions. After Google has crawled your site, you can get html suggestions under the Diagnostics section of the webmaster tools; this is vital to ensure Google is not reading any of your titles, pages, etc. as duplicated.
Getting Started
If you have not done so already, sign up for your free Google webmasters tools account, add and verify your site, and begin the process of educating yourself and excelling your website. If your website and company need to hire out the website maintenance, Internet marketing or website SEO, you will have a better understanding of what you are getting for your money.
