Taking advantage of the tools that our major search engines provide us can be vital in the success of search engine optimization and organic search results. In this article which is part 1 of 3 (2 future posts will follow), I am going to touch on one of the most important and useful tools that should be used for each site you run as well as visited frequently to assure your remain in good standings with the SERPS.
Let?s start with Google. As we all know, Google has 100?s of patents for tools, programs and scripts, but when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and Organic traffic, there are specific tools designed by Google to help you with your rankings and to assist you with better understanding your site. This post is Part 1 of 3 and will focus on Google Webmaster Tools. Future Posts will include Understanding:
1. Analytics
2. Google Trends
3. Google Insights
Google Webmaster Tools:
Description ? A free service provided by Google by means of meta tag or file upload verification. Google webmaster tools is designed to provide you with detailed reports about your pages? visibility on Google as well as report on various issues that if addressed can help your site perform better in search results.
With this service, webmasters can:
? Find issues related to Googlebot crawl errors
? Upload an XML Sitemap
? Generate and analyze robots.txt files
? Remove urls crawled by Googlebot
? Specify the preferred domains (with our without www)
? Identify issues with title and description meta tags
? Better understand the top searches used to reach a site
? Visual glimpse at how Googlebot sees your pages
? Remove unwanted sitelinks that Google may use in search results
? Receive notifications of quality guideline violations
? File for a site reconsideration
Now lets take a look at the pages and functions found with in Google Webmaster Tools and how they work.
Dashboard ? The first page viewed upon viewing a site listed in your Google Webmaster Tools Account, below is a screenshot of this page:
The dashboard is broken up into 5 ?Mini? View categories.
1. Search Queries
2. Links to your Site
3. Crawl Errors
4. Keywords
5. Sitemaps
Below I will break down the 5 categories and their functions:
#1 - The Search Queries page provides information about Google Web Search queries that have returned pages from your site, including:
? The total number of Google Web Search queries that returned pages from your site results over the given period.
? The top search queries that returned pages from your site.
? Impressions: The number of times pages from your site were viewed in search results.
? Clicks: The number of times your site's listing was clicked in search results for a particular query.
? CTR (clickthrough rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site.
To see additional information about a query, such as the position of your page on the Google search results page, and the URL of the page returned by the search query, just click the query. There is also 2 drop down menus to filter your results by Country or Origin such as Mobile, Images, Web, etc.
As seen in the screenshot above, for the keyword Porno, out of 14,800 impressions, there was 2400 clicks in the last 30 days which comes out to a 16% click thru ratio. The avg position for this site is #370 for this keyword in the Google organic results.
The information is this section can provide valuable information about your site
Notes:
? Review this list for expected keywords and also look for Unexpected keywords. Keywords that do not appear may not be considered relevant to your content and words you don?t expect to see could mean your site has been hacked. (Example, if your site is blog about Porn Discounts, and you have keywords for Free Casinos showing up in your queries, you will need to look into why those keywords are being pulled from your site).
? Compare impressions and CTR to identify how you can improve your content for better results. Simple changes to your Title and Description tags can often drastically increase click thru ratios.
#2 ?
Links to your site is a section in which you can backlinks (not all will be listed) to various pages of your site. As seen in the example below, ExampleSite.com will show you 16,763 links going to the index.php , 1261 going to pornstars.php , etc. If you click the hyperlinked number of links, it will take you to a listing page of these links.
Anchor Text Tab ? This tab will break down your anchors used for the backlinks show in the Links To Your Site section
#3
Crawl Errors ? provides details about the URLs that an attempt to crawl was made but failed. The crawl error reports on 7 major factors:
1. Not Found
2. URLs not followed
3. URLS restricted by robots.txt
4. URLs timed out
5. HTTP Errors
6. URL Unreachable
7. Soft 404?s
#4
Keywords ? A list of the most significant keywords Google found while crawling your site. When compared to the Search Queries report as well as your physical listing on Google, you will find insights as to how Google is interpreting the content of your site. In the screenshot below you will find the ?Significance? bar. This bar reflects how often the keyword is found on your sites pages. Clicking the keyword will give you sample pages in which these words appear.
#5
Sitemaps ? This section allows you to submit your sitemaps for your sites.
Define Sitemap: Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap?usually called Sitemap, with a capital S?is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.
As seen in the screenshot below, the section allows you to see the name of your sitemap, its status and how many pages with in your sitemap are indexed.
Above concludes the Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard. In this next section, I'll discuss the features found in the left sidebar of your Google Webmaster Tools Account:
Site Configuration
? Sitemaps ? Explained in #5 above
? Crawler Access ? In this section, you have 3 options
o Test Robots.txt
o Generate Robots.txt
o Remove URL
? Sitelinks ? Sitelinks are links to your sites Interior Pages ? Not all sites have sitelinks, Google will determine these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don?t wanted listed thru this section. Below is a screenshot of this section:
? Change of Address ? In this section you can notify Google that you have moved your site to a new domain.
? Settings ? In this section, you can choose Geographical Target, Preferred domain, Crawl Rate and Parameter Handling.
Your Site on the Web
? Search Queries ? Explained in #1 above
? Links to your Site ? Explained in #2 above
? Keywords ? Explained in #4 above
? Internal Links ? Pages linked to other pages in your site
? Subscriber Stats ? Website feeds are often used to publish lists of site updates, but they can also be used to provide other structured information - for example, search results or product lists - that readers can find useful to track. Readers can subscribe to these feeds and stay up to date with changes on your site. Feeds let readers keep track of a large number of sites or blogs without having to check each site manually. If you create your site using a tool such as Blogger or Typepad, you'll probably have a feed automatically created and published for you.
Diagnostics
? Malware ? Lists any Malware found on your site if present
? Crawl Errors ? Explained in #3 above
? Crawl Stats ? Graph of your last 90 Day Googlebot crawl activity
? HTML Suggestions ? When Googlebot crawled your site and ran across issues with your content, they will get listed here. Correcting these issues can help your sites user experience and performance. Below is a screenshot example of this page:
Labs
? Fetch as Googlebot ? In this section you can physically see exactly how a page appears to Google
? Sidewiki - a service offered by Google that lets users contribute helpful entries about the current webpage. Google Sidewiki is not affiliated with the website you're viewing.
? Site Performance - This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users
About The Author:
Bobby Taylor, also known as 2bet, has spent nearly 11 years in the adult industry. In 2004, he successfully combined gaming and adult through Webmaster Poker Tournaments on 2bet.com. He credits the rapid growth of 2bet.com to successful search engine optimization, and moved solely into SEO in 2007. In 2008 SEO AP was publicly launched and recently in 2009, a sister company site, X RATED SEO emerged.
Previous Educational Series Post:
Understanding Google's Algorithms