Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that helps you evaluate and improve the success of your website in the search results. Offered as a free service to anyone with a website, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) provides you with knowledge from the world's largest search engine, providing insights into how the website is viewed and helping you identify issues that need to be addressed.
From the name itself, it is hard to guess that Google Webmaster Tools are a set of tools for webmasters. What you don't know right away, however, is that this is a very useful tool that allows you to connect with Google and adjust many aspects of how Google views your site, such as listing the external and internal links to your site, adjusting the crawl rate at which Google bot indexes your site, checking the keywords that users typed to land on your site, and clicking the rate for each keyword.
Get Started?
You need to sign in first to use Google Webmaster Tools. You need to go through the verification process after you enter so that Google knows you're the site's legal owner you want to use Google Webmaster Tools on. There are different ways to check ownership. First is installing an HTML file and adding it to your site's root directory. Another is applying an HTML tag to your homepage header. If you use the same Google Account for Google Analytics, Google Analytics offers a third option to check ownership. There are more ways to verify ownership but search the Google Webmaster Tools settings if you are interested in them.
Verification
You must prove that you are an approved representative of the Site before you can access any data on your site. That is achieved through a verification process.
There are currently five key testing methods in place for GWT. There is no clear preference as to which form you are using, although the first two appear to be the most widely used since they have been around for longer.
- The HTML file upload: Google gives you a blank, specially named file that you just need to drop into your site's root directory. Once you have done that, just click the Verify button and you will have access to this site's GWT info.
- HTML tag: By clicking on this option you will obtain a metatag that you can insert into your home page header. To show your GWT info, click the Verify button once it's there. One thing to remember about using this verification method is that it is possible to inadvertently delete the tag during an update to the home page, which would lead to a revocation of the verification, but it will be corrected by reinserting the tag and clicking Verify again.
- Domain Name Provider: Google lets you select your domain name provider from a drop-down list. Click on your provider and Google will walk you through your website verification steps.
- Use Google Analytics: As the Google Analytics account administrator for your website, you can check the website using an asynchronous tracking code inserted in the header of your homepage.
- Using Google Tag Manager: This is a tool that lets you enter and control all your website monitoring tags like GWT.
The Dashboard
When your website has been checked you can continue to see data on your website. It can sometimes take a couple of hours to see any results, but it'll start rolling in.
Once it does, you can explore what Google sees — overview, results, and inspection of URLs using a few different tools. Profile gives you a rough profile of everything you rate for from what keywords to how much traffic you get.
Besides that, you'll see if the Google bot encounters any crawl errors while going through your website, the number of sites that link to yours, and how many Google pages have indexed.
Site index
Just like the rest, Google isn't fine. So configuring your site will help them rate your website higher. There are a few areas which you should be familiar with when configuring.
Crawl Errors
The segment on Crawl Errors shows the errors that Google bot has found on your pages. The data you get is close to what you get when using the Spider Simulator and it reveals unavailable sites, missing pages, server failures, and all kinds of issues that stopped Google from crawling your site correctly. You also get some other crawl stats that are useful to know (such as the number of pages crawled a day).
Sitemaps
The last section which you can access from the Dashboard is section Sitemaps. Here you can see your site's sitemaps Google has found and the number of URLs it includes. If Google's position map is different from what you wanted it to be, you can request a new sitemap for use by Google.
Robots.txt and Other Advanced Stuff
The parts mentioned so far are the basic sections of Google's Webmaster Tools. There is also a lot of advanced stuff in each but we're not going to describe it in depth. You may, for example, use your Google Webmaster Tools to upload a robots.txt file or set the desired domain format (i.e. with or without www) to be shown in the search results. Google Webmaster Tools also helps you to learn if malware infects your site. If it is, then you must first clean it and then resubmit it for analysis.
Google Webmaster Tools is a truly valuable SEO application. It gives you data on all important aspects of a website's SEO at a glance, such as keywords, links, crawl errors etc.
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