The information provided by Google Webmaster Tools once you verify ownership of your website (or client’s website) is extremely valuable. Any self-respecting SEO should know the ins and outs of what Google Webmaster Tools have to offer. Here is an abbreviated breakdown of the information provided, and what you can do with it to improve your search engine rankings:
- Web Crawl Erros – Make sure your internal linking is being optimized via PageRank scultping
- HTTP errors
- 404 Not found
- URLs not followed
- URLs restricted by robots.txt
- URLs timed out
- Unreachable URLs
- Content Analysis
- Title tag issues – Google webmaster tools reports your pages that are missing title tags. This can be extremely useful when conducting site audits for clients that frequently drop tags.
- Meta description issues
- Duplicate meta descriptions
- Long meta descriptions
- Short meta descriptions
- Links
- Pages with external links
- Pages with internal links – find out which of your pages have a lot of links pointing to them, and which have few links pointing to them. Then, in a way that makes sense to the user, anchor text link relevant keywords from high linked pages to low linked pages in order to steer your PageRank in the right directions.
- Tools
- Analyze robots.txt
- Set geographic targeting
- Enable enhanced image search
- Set crawl rate
- Set preferred domain
- Remove URLs
Once you have launched a new website your very first SEO related tasks should be to upload the Google Webmaster tag, verify that you own the site. Then create an XML sitemap to sit on your site like so, yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. You will then submit this URL to Google Webmaster Tools in order for Google to crawl your entire site faster than it normally would without the submission. Happy SEOing!
