Use Google Webmaster Tools to Get the Best of Your Website
Everyone at some point or the other has been fascinated by how Google views their sites and decides the rankings. While one can only assume based on a few factors, Google Webmaster tools are the only solution with any to that effect. The tools help in diagnosing the errors if any on your site, in increasing its visibility in terms of rankings and also let the owner make preferences with regard to how his/her website is listed. It is a treasure house of tools indeed.
The first and foremost thing one requires to use Google webmaster tools is an active Google account. Once that’s done, the rest is almost done as well.
Once the Google webmaster tools page has loaded, when prompted, enter the URL of your site. Google asks you to verify whether you have control of the aforementioned site. This can be established either by loading an html file of the name as specified by Google onto your website or by including a META tag on the home page’s header. This way, Google makes sure you view all data with respect to your website and that only you are able to access it.
After the website has been verified to be yours, Google takes a few days to collect stats before you can see the profile of your website. The overview screen contains various details that could help you improvise upon your website, with Google’s help. There are various services and statistics on offer here on this page.
Diagnostics elaborates upon 404 errors encountered by Google when it crawls your site. Statistics has innumerable reports that you can access to have an idea about the traffic to your website. Top Queries shows the search queries that showed your website in the results. Googlebot shows anchor text and inbound links to your site as well. Crawling Stats report elaborates upon the Page Rank of your website and this helps assuage the popularity of specific pages on your website. The Index Stats are similar to advanced Google queries. Subscriber Stats assesses your feed management system and is a good alternative to RSS. The link reports on Google Webmaster tools provide an overview of links by page and by domain. Google Sitemaps uploads, manages and catalogues XML files and is one of the most important and complicated tools offered by Google Webmaster.
In addition to all these, the tools area of Google Webmaster houses tools to analyze robots.txt, to manage site verification, setting crawl rate and preferred domain. It also provides fun tools like the enhanced image search which brings you to prominence in image search results.
Regularly using Google Webmaster tools is sure to enhance knowledge about your own site, about how Google works and also how to use the two to optimize your site. Knowledge after all is power, and using it well is in your hands.
