Do you have a Google Webmaster Tools account for your website but are not sure how to use all the features? Google Webmaster Tools has so many different features that it can become confusing as to what is useful and what you need to take note of to improve your website.Within Google Webmaster Tools you are able to see a lot of statistics which are all related to your website. You are able to see a lot of very useful information but first you do need to make sure that you have verified ownership of your website. You can do this by adding code to your website which Google provides and you need to add it to your site. Once you have done this you can access all of the webmaster tools available.
Some of the best features Google Webmaster tools has to offer are:
HTML Improvements
In this section of Google Webmaster Tools it shows you what potential issues Google has found when indexing and crawling your website. This means that it can recommend changes that you need to make to your website which can even help your rankings in Google! The issues that Google tells you about will not stop them from crawling your website but it will improve the user experience which Google loves and tries to improve. A great example of what Google can tell you about is your websites Title tags and Meta Descriptions. The more descriptive and informative they are, the more likely they are to get clicked on. The more your webpage gets clicked on, the more Google will like your website and rank it higher. If Google have not crawled or indexed your website yet then you need to wait to until it has been in order to see the data for your website.
Some data that can be included in the HTML improvements include:
Title Problems– Google will state if there are any potential problems with the Title Tags on every page on your website. If any are missing or duplicated Google will tell you so you can make the relevant changes.
Meta Description Problems
– If there are any duplicated Meta descriptions or any other problems, Google will tell you so you can make the changes to the Meta Descriptions on your website.
Non-indexable Content
– This means content which is not indexable by Google will be made known to you so that you can change the way they are formatted or laid out. Some examples of non-indexable content can be Videos, Images and Media Files.
Structured Data Highlighter
This section of Google Webmaster Tools allows you to teach Google the structure pattern of data on your website. By this I mean that you are able to tag data fields on your website which then means Google can present your website information and data more attractively. The more attractive you can make your information and data the more likely you are to get clicks onto your website. If a searcher is looking through Google results and your website information is more attractive than others, you are much more likely to get clicked on.
The best kind of example is if your website has event listings. You can then tag the events on Google Webmaster from your website and then when someone does a search for events in a certain location the results that come up look different than normal results:
You can see that when I do a search for Derby Events this is one of the results that comes up. It is different to normal results as it has the date and then the event that is happening on that date. This has been done by adding a tag to the events on Google Webmaster on the website.
Search Query Report
In this section of Google Webmaster Tools you are able to see which terms your website is showing up for. It also shows you the impressions your website has had and the amount of clicks you’ve received. This information can be massively helpful if you use it in the right way. If you can see that you are showing up for a search term and you are in a high position but no one is clicking onto your website, this means you then can change the page which is ranking high and slightly improve it.
Below is an example of the information you will be shown:
Here you can see that for search term 1 it has 51 impressions and has 40 clicks. This is a very good statistic as it means you are getting a great Click through rate to your website.
If you compare that to search term 4 you will see that it has 53 impressions but only 1 click. If this was your website you would take the search term 4 and see how you can improve the webpage so that you can get more clicks to your website.
Link Report
In this section the Link report tool will show you a sample of who is linking to your website. You are also able to see your most linked content and what anchor text has been used to link to your website. The sample links that are shown are links that the Googlebot has discovered during its latest crawling and indexing process. This is a great feature because it means you are able to see where your links are coming from. As you are able to get a list of links that are linking to your website you can get a better idea of the quality of links that your website has attracted. If you look at your link report and there seems to be a large number of ‘spammy’ looking links then this should certainly prompt you to start to question what your link profile might be like. If you have a bad link profile then this will mean your websites rankings will suffer. If you are worrying about how to improve your Google rankings read this article: The Business Owners SEO Guide: 5 Tips To Improve Your Google Ranking
If the number of links you see in the link report section is less then you thought then don’t worry. Google processes the links and can view different links in the same way, for example:
http://www.mysite.co.uk -> http://mysite.co.uk
http://www.mysite.co.uk/news/ -> http://www.mysite.co.uk/news
Both of these examples would be read the same by Google which means if you have a large amount of links which is just http://mysite.co.uk Google would class them as the same as http://www.mysite.co.uk. This means there is a high chance that the number of links that are displayed may be reduced.
Most Linked Content Report
In this section of Google Webster Tools you are able to see your most linked content. You can see which pages on your website have links going to it and how many different domains they are from. This is some really great information because it means that you can see where your links are coming from and what the diversity is throughout your website. By this I mean if you can see that one page has a massive amount of links going to it and another only has one then this can mean you can start to build links to other pages so that your link profile is more diverse.
In this example you can see that the Homepage of the website has 104 links going to it and those links come from 33 source domains. This is a good diversity of links from different domains. Compare this to webpage 3 which only has 2 links and those two links come from one source domain.
Conclusion
If you use every section available in Google Webmaster Tools and take the time to learn how to use each one, not only will your website benefit and improve but your business will also benefit and improve. If you learn to look at all the small detail on your website you will carry that across into your business and before you know it the smallest of things will get changed and the way you work will improve. You always need to have the mind-set that your website needs improving and that Google Webmaster Tools will help with this. Making the smallest of changes to your website can have a huge impact on how Google indexes and crawls your website.
Article by: Adam Jones
