Google Webmaster Tools, A Quick and Easy Tutorial

Google Webmaster Tools: Google webmaster tools allows any user who owns a web-site or blog to track various metrics regarding their site. These include anything from problems encountered during search crawls to the most prominent keywords that came up with results for you site. It is fantastic tool for anyone who wants to know if Google is having trouble crawling their site for one reason or another.

Where do you start? To get started with Google webmaster tools, go to your account management, if you have not signed up for it yet, go to the “More…” link, find the text saying “Google Webmaster Tools” and sign up for it (basically you start using it whilst you are logged in to your Google account). The link on your account will look like the image on the right, click on it to get started.

Dashboard: The image on the left is what you will see when you have successfully validated your site (it is a quick process with a wizard to guide you through). Once you have successfully validated your site, you will be able to use this dashboard to reach various vital statistics Google has found out about while crawling your site. At the moment the image on the left shows this site’s dashboard, I have a few URL’s which have not been found and a few restricted by my Robots document. These are problems which I resurrected this morning, so they should be gone within the next two or three weeks.

The Menu and Interface: There is a menu on the left hand side which enables you to find out a wide variety of statistics, the menu looks like the image on the right. You can use the menu to navigate and find out whether or not Google has crawled your site, your robots.txt and if your site-map is valid and functioning properly. The status for a working site-map will usually display the text “OK”, informing you when Google last downloaded it. You also have the option of “manually submitting a site-map” if you do not want to wait for Google to find it automatically.

In the diagnostics panel, you will be able to find information about Google’s crawling of your site. If there are any problems they will be present in that particular section and the front page. Content analysis will allow you to know if there have been any “duplicate meta tag descriptions” and very short or very long descriptions present.

The statistics tab enables you to find the “top search queries” for your site, it is very useful for knowing what keywords your site ranks best for so you can focus in to rank for those particular keywords.

The “index stats” tab enables you to find information about links which have been indexed for your site, how your site looks in Google’s cache and any other general information Google has about your site.

Subscriber stats helps you to find out exactly how many people are subscribing to your feed via Google feed reader or iGoogle. The links tab tells you how many internal and external links your site has, this is useful for people who want to make their site as search engine friendly as possible by reducing excessive external links.

The other interesting features of the console are in the “Tools” section, you can analyze your robots.txt, manage the verification of your site, set your preferred domain, associate a geographic target to your site, enable enhanced image search and remove unwanted indexed URL’s from your site. The webmaster tools service provided exclusively by www.google.com is really great and I highly recommend using it if you have not started yet. You can read about when it was released here: We Love You Webmasters (The Article May Be A Bit Dated, But It Says How It Came About).

Posted on February 10, 2008
Filed Under Google News and Services |

Tags: google webmaster tools, serps, sitemap, webmaster tools

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