Google Webmaster Tools

What is it? How can this help me? Google Webmaster tools

Google webmaster tools is used to by webmasters to find out how they are doing in Google’s search engine. This is a wonderful tool for any Webmaster. With this tool you will be able to find out what keywords you are ranking for. You can also find out how many links you have or at least how many links Google knows about. Well let’s take a closer look at Google Webmaster tools.

Google webmaster tools - Diagnostic

The first page you can access in Google webmaster tools. This section of google webmaster tools tells you if the Google bot found any errors in your website and what they are.

Verify you website on Google webmaster tools

Google will want to make sure that you are the owner/webmaster of the website. You will not be able to aaccess any information to do with your website untill you verify that you are the owner. Verfy via a meta tag. all you have to do is place this code on your home page. Once completed you simply choose verify. This can be done at any time after placing the code.

Crawl rate

This will show you any Googlebot activity in the last 90 days. This will also show you your current crawl speed. This should be at normal. There are 3 different speeds though. Faster, Normal and Slower. For a long time you will only be able to choose Normal or Slower. Better keep it on normal.

Preferred Domain

You have the option of choosing how you want your URL to be displayed. yourdomain.com or with a www.youdomain.com. I would recomend choosing www.yourdomain.com

URL Removals

This is a new way to get old pages of your website out off Googles index. This can be useful if you renamed some of your pages. If you need to remove a URL from Google's index this is where you do it at.

Statistics - Crawl Stats

this shows your PageRank for every page in your website. Well at least the distribution of it. If the bar is full for PageRank not yet assigned then you are still in the sandbox. It also shows a 3 month list of your highest ranked page in your website.

Query Stats

This show you what search results your site is showing up for.

Page analysis

These statistics show you how the Googlebot sees your site. This includes external links and Keywords through out you webesite.

Index Stats

Helps to show you how your being indexed in Google.

The Links Section

This is one of the best tools you have. This section will show you how many links, what they are, and from what webpages. It also shows you internal and external links.

Google Webmaster Central - Hack Additional Link Information

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to see what the Anchor Text and the PR level and if the link contained a nofollow. This is a great tool for SEO. You will need the foxfire browser and 2 plugins. I want everybody to know that the nofollow links are yellow and have a cross thought them.

Two simple steps to make this work

1 Install the Greasemonkey add-on to your Firefox
2 Install the script provided downloaded here

Google webmaster tools Sitemaps Section

This is also a very important section. You will need to create a sitemap for your website and upload it on your web server. You can call this file sitemap.xml

This file should be in your root directory

Don’t know how to create a sitemap? this site will make it very easy XML-sitemaps