5 Tips for Using Google Webmaster Tools

 Tips for Using Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a free toolset that’s absolutely invaluable for SEO trouble shooting

It’s pretty simple to set up, you just need to verify that you’re the site owner (there are a number of ways to do this, so just use the one that is best for you) and you’ll have instant access to an abundance of useful information that will help you to improve your website and your search engine optimisation (SEO)

Here are five tips that will get you started

Crawl Stats

Crawl Stats give you information in Google’s crawling activity for the last 90 day period. When you click into this report which is located in Diagnostics, you’ll see three reports

Pages crawled per day: Overall, it’s a good sign to see this graph going up. Whilst there are peaks and troughs, you’ll be able to see if there is a steady incline, decline or no change at all. Spikes in this report are often due to the introduction of new pages or an increase in inbound links

Kilobytes crawled per day: This graph should bear some resemblance to the Pages crawled per

day graph in terms of the peaks and troughs in the graph

Time spent downloading a page: This graph will be different from the above two and is likely (hopefully) to not show as many peaks. Peaks on this graph could be a server problem as in

the norm, Google should not take very long downloading your pages

These stats are useful for diagnosing problems and gauging performance issues

Not Found Errors

Not found crawl errors are very useful for usability & SEO. If customers are browsing around your site and finding that links are not taking them anywhere, they’re likely to get annoyed and go elsewhere. This tool (which is accessed on the top right of the dashboard) will identify all not found URLs in your site. Be aware, that this can sometimes be slightly outdated, and Google state

If you don’t recognize these URLs and/or don’t think they should be accessible, you can safely ignore these errors. If, however, you see URLs listed in the ‘Not found’ section that you recognize and would like crawled, we hope you find the ‘Details’ column helpful in identifying and fixing the errors

So don’t dwell too much on getting this down to 0 errors in GWT, just use the information to improve site usability

As well as links from within your site that are leading to a 404, this will also show you links from outside sites that are leading to a 404. This aspect is particularly valuable for SEO. Use this feature in GWT to do is identify the linked to pages within your site that no longer exist and redirect those pages to a real page within your site. This tactic will lead to increased link juice and increased visitors

Meta Descriptions and Title Tags

Google Webmaster Tools will provide you with a list of URLs that have problems in their title tags or Meta descriptions, this list will include duplicates as well as incidences of titles or Meta descriptions that are too long or too short. Go into Diagnostics and HTML suggestions to find this information. Duplicate meta titles, especially can affect your rankings within Google and meta descriptions should be snappy and targeted to each specific page to help CTR of each page on your site

Top Search Queries

Whilst you can get your top search queries out of Google Analytics or whatever analytics tool you use, I particularly like the Webmaster Tools version for the simple reason that it shows your average position within Google as part of the data. This enables you to look at your top search terms by position. The reason this is helpful is that when deciding which keywords to push, I particularly like to focus on the keywords that are currently in positions 2-4 as increases in positions at this level will have the most increased in traffic

Site Links

If your site had a list of links below its Google listing, you can use the sitelink section within Site Configuration to control the links that are shown. You can’t actually tell Google which links to show, but you can block links that you don’t want shown

These are just a few of the many tools available in Google Webmaster Tools and Google often add new features to this great tool. If you’re not a regular user of GWT, try these features out for size and look around to get used to other features on offer. If you are a regular user of GWT, let us know your favourite features and why

PageRank Update Coming in 2-3 Days

Hey I am not the one saying it, the word is coming from Mr. Matt Cutts head of Google’s web spam team

As you probably know this is just an update of the nominal PR, the one you see on the toolbars. The real one is updated much more frequently, and that is the one that affects your search rankings

There are people that say “Hey, I don’t care for PR anymore.” Well, I would believe the ones that don’t have any toolbar installed on their browsers to check the PR of the different websites around

Personally I do care for it. Not a lot, but still

You can’t deny that PR is a metric used by people to evaluate the trustworthy of a website. Some advertisers and site buyers also take it into consideration

Anyway, let’s see what will happen. I am hoping that some of my new websites will gain some PR from 0, and hopefully Daily Blog Tips will keep its PR7

5 SEO Principles I Learned Over The Years

I don’t consider myself an SEO expert, but I have been in the trenches for many years

already, and managed to build some fairly successful websites when it comes to search engine traffic, with a couple of them breaking the one million monthly visitors mark

Over this time I came across many SEO tips and tricks, but those come and go. On the other hand there are some basic principles that never change, and I want to talk about some of them

Clichê as it may sound, content is still king

You probably already know this, so I won’t waste too many words on this point. But yeah having unique and useful content is still the cornerstone of any SEO strategy. Without it no sophisticated SEO tactics will be able to drive a lot of organic traffic to your website

You have to partner with Google, and not compete against it

When trying to optimize your website for Google you have basically two approaches to follow: you either co-operate with it or you try to out-smart it.

Out-smarting it involves trying to find loopholes in the algorithm, ways to trick the search bots, methods to artificially increase your rankings and so on. The so-called blackhat SEO. In my opinion this is the worst approach you can follow, as it might work in the short term, but in the long run you’ll probably have a lot of headaches.

If instead you play along with Google you’ll be building a more solid asset out of your websites, and in the long term you’ll receive a lot more traffic from it. You can read more about this on Danny Sullivans’ post No, Advanced SEO Does Not Mean Spamming

Understand Google’s business model

In the previous point I talk about partnering with Google, but what does that mean in practice? It means that you should understand Google’s business model and support it with your websites

Essentially Google makes money by serving search results that match exactly what people are looking for, and by serving ads both on those search result pages and on partner websites that have content matching the search queries

In other words, if you want to rank high in search results you need to make sure that your content will match and satisfy the needs of whatever your visitors might be searching for on Google. If you get this part right half the battle is already won

There’s a post on Blogging Tips with 3 ways you can use to increase the relevancy of your posts

Unique and useful content is not enough

As I mentioned in the first point, having unique and useful content should always be the first part of your SEO strategy. Even if you have buttloads of high quality content, though, this alone will not be enough to drive organic traffic to your website

Why not? Because simply writing and publishing that content on your website doesn’t mean that Google will know about it, let alone trust it. You can achieve this will the point below

Get people talking about your content/website

The second half of the SEO equation (the first one being having unique and useful content) is to get Google to know and trust your content. Without getting technical, you can achieve this by getting other people to talk about your content and website

For example, if you write a highly articulated post explaining what caused the latest financial crisis it’s likely that many financial bloggers will link to your post, people interested in finance will share and like your post on Facebook, others will retweet it, so on and so forth. Google tracks all those mentions, and it will figure that your content is probably top notch. The result is that your post will rank high when people search on Google for related terms.

If you want some practical ideas of how you can get people talking about your content check out this article: 4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

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