Google Webmaster Tool (GWT) is a free toolset by Google that helps you understand what’s going on with your site. Before you start optimizing your site, the first step is to sign up for a GWT account. GWT gives you all the tools and diagnostics for a healthy site.
Some of the benefits that come with this free tool include:
- Detect potential issues of your site
- Learn now users find your website
- Make optimization to help Google better understand your site
How to get started?
Adding Your Website
The foremost thing to do is to login to GWT and add your website. After adding your website, you’ll have to verify that you own that website.
- You can choose to add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration
- You can upload new HTML files to your sites
- You can add meta tags to your site’s homepage
- If you have a Google Analytics account, you can link that to GWT
The Dashboard
After verification, you can now start examining the date for your site. Dashboard gives you a quick view of useful information for your site, along with any new messages from Google. It also provides a rough overview of what keywords are ranking for, and you’ll also see if the Google bot is experiencing any crawl errors when going through your website, pages indexed by Google and more.
Configuring your Website
Submitting a sitemap is a good way to make sure that Google index the pages of your website. If you don’t submit a sitemap, Google may not discover some of the pages and you won’t get as much traffic. Google requires you to submit sitemaps in an XML format and they can’t contain over 50,000 URLs or larger than 10 Megs. You can create XML sitemaps here.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages displayed on search results page of Google. All sites have sitelinks, but as you grow in popularity, you’ll naturally get them. These are a collection of links below the main link, pointing to what they believe to be the most important links on that page.
How Google looks at your website
Google Webmaster Tools lets you know how Google looks at your website. GWT allows you to see how Google views your website
Search Queries: By monitoring the search queries page, you can work on improving the click through rate to enhance the chances of clicking on your listing when people search.
Links to your website: This happens naturally if you provide valuable information to the users. A good way to monitor the growth of your links is to monitor it via GWT.
Internal links: Linking your web pages together is a good way to enhance your presence on Google.
Keywords: In this section, you’ll get a fair idea of what keywords you want to rank for. Keywords for your website will be shown here.
Diagnostics
In this section, you can figure out what’s wrong with your website and how you can fix it.
Malware: If you have malware on your server, you will get a message.
Crawl errors: This section will show you if there are any problems that relate to your website. The most common error is a 404 error.
HTML Suggestions: These cover issues with your content. The most common problem here is related to title tags and Meta descriptions. You need to make sure that the title tags are not too short or too long.
Site Performance: It lets you know how your website performs including website’s load time.
CONCLUSION
GWT is a great tool to monitor the success of your website or blog. If you haven’t started doing it, get started now. This will guide you in the right direction and tell you what to do to improve your Google traffic.
Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, Now!
What do you think about GWT and its relevance? Share your thoughts with us.
Subscribe to our newsletter today and never miss a post!