Webmaster tools are scary at first, but you must overcome your fear
Looking at Google Webmaster Tools can be like staring into the matrix. It’s a tangle of information and without properly understanding what it all means and where it comes from, it can be a frightening prospect.
It is important to remember that as a free service Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), provides more useful information about your site than anything else and learning how to look at the results and act on them can help you to improve the visibility of your site and therefore increase sales.
One of the best ways to learn how to use it is to just jump in and start playing with it. Google provides some great explanations which can help you get to grips with every element. But where to start?
If you haven’t already, you first need to create an account and verify your site. When you go to GWT you should see a big red button saying “Add a site.” After you have done this you will need to verify the site.
There are a number of verification methods, meta tag and file upload are the two most popular methods of doing this and will come with detailed instructions on what to do.
When you’re all signed up, you can start making your way through the information.
We’ve taken a look at three of the most useful and important elements of the GWT to help you get going.
Search Queries
This report is one of the most helpful when it comes to getting your site to appear more regularly in searches.
It highlights direct traffic to your site from certain keywords and phrases that visitors have used in search, it also shows you which keyword phrases your website has been appearing for but not receiving any clicks (impressions) and it gives you the average position of your site in search engine results.
You can also track the progress of any SEO campaign using this section. There is a graph on the top tab which displays your movement over a month and you can adjust this period to look at performance during a specific time.
Once you have this kind of information you can start to take action.
If keywords you expect to see appear aren’t there – you’re site might not have enough content relevant to those keywords.
If there are keywords you are appearing for but not getting click throughs, you can try and make meta descriptions more compelling for people to encourage them to click.
Crawl Error reports
This section will let you know if Google is able to crawl your indexed pages successfully. Fixing these issues can improve your SEO and your visitors’ experience on your site.
The key here is not to be freaked out if there are thousands of errors – there are sometimes good reasons for pages to have them. There are a few things to look out for.
Google changed its crawl error reports last year to rank in level of importance sop those at the top are most likely to be real issues that you can fix.
You can look through these one by one and when you think you have fixed a problem, you can mark the error as “fixed” and ask Google to check the error again.
You should also watch out for a spike in errors, if there is an unusually high level then this is something you should look into further.
Link analysis
You can find data on your links under the traffic tab. Your link profile is an important element to the SEO success of your website.
Analysing your link profile can show you where links are coming from and which pages are most popular for external links. You can also have a look at which links are beneficial and which ones might be hurting the site.
Using this data you can plan how to improve your backlink portfolio and understand trends over time, seeing how the link popularity of the site is changing.
You can also use this section to look at your internal links. Internal links give search engines pointers to important content pages. You should have lots of internal links pointing to pages which are high priority.
If you find this isn’t the case, you can work on building those internal links up.
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