Google is helping bloggers and website owners by various ways to maximize their search engine optimization. Google webmaster tools and Google Analytics are two most popular SEO tools introduced by Google for bloggers and website owners. These tools are widely used by bloggers to maximize their SEO and getting more exposure in search engine results.
In this article, I will explain the importance, functions and features of Google webmaster tools to optimize your blog search engine rankings. It is most recommended advice for every blogger to register his blog at Google Webmaster tools after its creation so he will have more precise knowledge about his blog's SEO.
Introduction To Google Webmaster Tools:
Google webmaster tools is a free web service by Google for webmasters to track multiple SEO factors for their websites. This is helpful to check indexing status and optimize visibility of the sites. These tools help site owners in following ways.- Submitting and checking a sitemap on Google.
- Notifying about Meta tags issues of the site.
- Generating and checking a robots.txt file. It tells Google those pages which you don't want to be crawled by Google in search results. This tool also helps in discovering if you accidentally submitted a page to robots.txt file.
- Accessing the list of internal and external links to your site. It helps to know which pages links to your site.
- Checking the keywords which are bringing traffic to the site. The number of individual search queries, number of impressions per search term, number of clicks, click through rate and average position in search results.
- Notifying of security issues related to the site.
- Automatic notifications about Google penalties so a site owner comes to know at time if his site is penalized by Google.
How You Can Use Google Webmaster Tools To Improve SEO Rankings:
Registering a site with Google webmaster tools is very simple process and if you own a blog at blogger, then it is just ABC to link your blog. After registering your site, webmaster tools are accessible to you. I am gonna give overview to some most important tools here.Tip: Click On An Image To Enlarge It
1. Search Traffic Tools:
Search traffic tools help site owners in tracking the traffic of a site. These tools give information about Google search results, internal and external links and penalties to a site by Google. Lets explore these tools.
A) Search Queries:
This tool helps a site owner in determining keywords and search terms which are used when his site is appeared in search results. It gives complete data of the number of impressions, clicks through rate and average position in search results. Now we try to understand these terms.
(Tip: You can click at a query to expand it thus getting detailed statistics.)
Query:
It shows the searched keywords which a visitor types in Google to search his required material and finds your website in search results. This thing helps you in checking the keywords which are bringing organic traffic to your blog so you may focus on the keywords more precisely. Take a look which keywords are bringing more traffic and then boost your traffic by concentrating more on them along with giving some more attention to those keywords which are getting less exposure in search results.
Impressions:
This field shows the number of impression which your site or blog has received for a particular keywords in Google search.
Clicks:
Clicks:
This shows the total number of clicks which a site received in Google search results. So you can figure out if your site is good enough optimized to receive the visitor's attention in search results.
CTR (Click Through Rate):
CTR (Click Through Rate):
This is the percentage ratio of number of impressions over number of clicks for a particular keyword. It is a matter of worry when you see that a particular keyword is giving the site good exposure in search results but the CTR is low. So it indicates you should optimize the meta description for your pages to grab visitors' attention so people click on your links. Concentrating on Posts' titles is also a good practice because it is also helpful for crawlers as well as visitors.
Average Position:
Average Position:
This metric tells the actual position of your site in Google search results for a specific keyword. Usually people browse only top 2 pages of search results so if you see yourself at pages more than 3+, then apply some SEO on your site to boost its rankings.
Top Pages:
Top Pages:
In the search traffic tools, you see a "Top Pages" option beside "Top Queries" buttons. Clicking on this option gives the data about individual pages rather than individual queries so you can determine which pages of your site are most popular in Google search results.
You can also download the data and charts for checking that offline.
B. Links To Your Site:
This tool gives information about websites which are linked to your site. As most of you already know that backlink building is most important strategy in SEO so this tools tells you how much backlinks Google has found for your site.
You are not informed only about the domains linking to your site but also the number of individual pages which contain a backlink to the site. It also tells which of your pages are linked with different websites on world wide web and the data of anchor texts which are linked with your site.
C. Internal Links:
You get information of internal links for your site. The link which points to another section, part or link of the same webpage or to the same website or domain is considered as Internal Link. You can find internal links for the whole website or for a specific page using this tool.
D. Manual Actions:
This tool automatically notifies you if Google detects any manual webspam action by your site and thus penalizing it for any reason so you may afterwards correct it in order to gain back your rankings.
E. International Targeting:
This tool helps a site owner to set search results for targeted visitors on the basis of region and language. Those who want to get more exposure from a specific region or from people speaking a specific language might find it helpful.
Country and language settings could be easily set here for targeting visitors.
Thus it is clear from the term crawl that here you may find options about indexing of your web site. There are different crawl tools provided by Google. Lets explore them.
A. Crawl Errors:
It tells about the errors which Google bots face while crawling a site. They may be DNS and server errors related to connectivity of the site. It displays the time and date when Google bots face the error.
B. Crawl Stats:
It shows the crawling status of your site by Google bots which includes pages crawled per day, time spend on downloading a page and size of data downloaded per day.
C. Fetch As Google:
This option let you check how Google bots see your website while crawling. You can select a medium i.e desktop or mobile and see how Google bots are able to see your site or a specif page of the site. You will find two options here.
First option is Fetch only which gives you HTML view of the Google bots view which surely not helpful for those users who are just beginner to web designing and HTML.
Second option is Fetch and Render. Google introduced this option a few months ago which also works like Fetch only feature but in a more detailed and compact way. If you render a page using this option, Google will show the real page display for how the Google bots see your page. Rendering option make use of CSS, Images, Javascript and other formatting on your page so you will see the Google bots view in a more humanized way.
D. Robots.txt tester:
Robots.txt is a file which is used to tell Google which pages to leave on the site while indexing. Sometimes a page of a site is accidentally placed in robots.txt file which stops indexing of the page.
This tool helps you in checking if you have accidentally placed a page in robots.txt file which must be indexed by search engines so you can remove it from this file thus improving the SEO of your site.
E. Sitemaps:
Sitemap is basically an XML file that contains all the URLs of a site. It is used to inform search engines about the URLs of the site which are available for crawling. Google Webmaster tools allow you to submit multiple sitemaps for a site so Google bots crawl your site perfectly. It is the most important part of SEO. It is somewhat similar to robots.txt file but in a different way. robots.txt file tells search engines about the pages which are not to be indexed while sitemaps provide the list of those pages which are to be crawled and indexed by Google.
This is the worst part of SEO if it happens so also take care of human visitors as well as bots. Now we look on these tools how they work.
A. Data Highlighter tool:
This tool let you set events, reviews listings, articles or multiple sets of similar pages for your site while they appear in search results. So the attention of visitors might redirects towards your site resulting in more clicks. These highlighted links help you to build a strong connection with readers. Basically they work as tags which are embedded with a post to appear in search results. It could be a sort of event reminder with title, date, author and other type of similar tags. You will better understand the use of this tool by watching the example.
B. HTML Improvements Tool:
This tool defines if there is any flaw in HTML of your site specially for meta tags. It notifies the site owner if there is something amendable in meta description of any page in a site for example, duplicate, short or long meta descriptions and issues with title tags of the pages.
Meta description and title tags are most important part SEO when we talk about human because they have a key role in telling a human about your content, not a bot.
C. Site Links:
By the help of this tool, a webmaster can set some links to appear under the search results when someone search for his site.
It is very common practice adopted by popular sites which show their most useful links under the site search results. This also helps in giving your readers freedom to access your site's popular content directly from search results giving a professional impact to the site.
A. Index Status:
This tool shows graphical data about the site indexing status by Google for the past year only. It shows how many pages were indexed by Google for the past year. It shows the status even if the site was not added in Google webmaster tools.
B. Content Keywords:
This is another most important tool with respect to SEO which tells the keywords used in your content. It also tells different variants for a keyword and its significance in search rankings. Now you will ask what is meant by variants?
You can also download the data and charts for checking that offline.
B. Links To Your Site:
This tool gives information about websites which are linked to your site. As most of you already know that backlink building is most important strategy in SEO so this tools tells you how much backlinks Google has found for your site.
You are not informed only about the domains linking to your site but also the number of individual pages which contain a backlink to the site. It also tells which of your pages are linked with different websites on world wide web and the data of anchor texts which are linked with your site.
C. Internal Links:
You get information of internal links for your site. The link which points to another section, part or link of the same webpage or to the same website or domain is considered as Internal Link. You can find internal links for the whole website or for a specific page using this tool.
D. Manual Actions:
This tool automatically notifies you if Google detects any manual webspam action by your site and thus penalizing it for any reason so you may afterwards correct it in order to gain back your rankings.
E. International Targeting:
This tool helps a site owner to set search results for targeted visitors on the basis of region and language. Those who want to get more exposure from a specific region or from people speaking a specific language might find it helpful.
Country and language settings could be easily set here for targeting visitors.
2. Crawl Tools:
Crawlers are those web software which downloads the web pages available on internet for indexing them in search results. They are also called bots and spiders.Thus it is clear from the term crawl that here you may find options about indexing of your web site. There are different crawl tools provided by Google. Lets explore them.
A. Crawl Errors:
It tells about the errors which Google bots face while crawling a site. They may be DNS and server errors related to connectivity of the site. It displays the time and date when Google bots face the error.
B. Crawl Stats:
It shows the crawling status of your site by Google bots which includes pages crawled per day, time spend on downloading a page and size of data downloaded per day.
C. Fetch As Google:
This option let you check how Google bots see your website while crawling. You can select a medium i.e desktop or mobile and see how Google bots are able to see your site or a specif page of the site. You will find two options here.
First option is Fetch only which gives you HTML view of the Google bots view which surely not helpful for those users who are just beginner to web designing and HTML.
Second option is Fetch and Render. Google introduced this option a few months ago which also works like Fetch only feature but in a more detailed and compact way. If you render a page using this option, Google will show the real page display for how the Google bots see your page. Rendering option make use of CSS, Images, Javascript and other formatting on your page so you will see the Google bots view in a more humanized way.
D. Robots.txt tester:
Robots.txt is a file which is used to tell Google which pages to leave on the site while indexing. Sometimes a page of a site is accidentally placed in robots.txt file which stops indexing of the page.
This tool helps you in checking if you have accidentally placed a page in robots.txt file which must be indexed by search engines so you can remove it from this file thus improving the SEO of your site.
E. Sitemaps:
Sitemap is basically an XML file that contains all the URLs of a site. It is used to inform search engines about the URLs of the site which are available for crawling. Google Webmaster tools allow you to submit multiple sitemaps for a site so Google bots crawl your site perfectly. It is the most important part of SEO. It is somewhat similar to robots.txt file but in a different way. robots.txt file tells search engines about the pages which are not to be indexed while sitemaps provide the list of those pages which are to be crawled and indexed by Google.
3. Search Appearance Tools:
Search appearance tools help in setting how a site appears in search results. These tools basically helpful in stealing the attentions of human visitors not of bots or crawlers so it is advised to make most of it. It is a fact that bots crawl your sites which brings you in search engine rankings but it is another thing to remember that it is matter of worrying if search engines are placing you at the top but humans are ignoring you.This is the worst part of SEO if it happens so also take care of human visitors as well as bots. Now we look on these tools how they work.
A. Data Highlighter tool:
This tool let you set events, reviews listings, articles or multiple sets of similar pages for your site while they appear in search results. So the attention of visitors might redirects towards your site resulting in more clicks. These highlighted links help you to build a strong connection with readers. Basically they work as tags which are embedded with a post to appear in search results. It could be a sort of event reminder with title, date, author and other type of similar tags. You will better understand the use of this tool by watching the example.
B. HTML Improvements Tool:
This tool defines if there is any flaw in HTML of your site specially for meta tags. It notifies the site owner if there is something amendable in meta description of any page in a site for example, duplicate, short or long meta descriptions and issues with title tags of the pages.
Meta description and title tags are most important part SEO when we talk about human because they have a key role in telling a human about your content, not a bot.
C. Site Links:
By the help of this tool, a webmaster can set some links to appear under the search results when someone search for his site.
4. Google Index Tools:
These tools help you in checking index status of your website, requesting a link removal from crawling and check your content keywords. Lets know more about these tools.A. Index Status:
This tool shows graphical data about the site indexing status by Google for the past year only. It shows how many pages were indexed by Google for the past year. It shows the status even if the site was not added in Google webmaster tools.
B. Content Keywords:
This is another most important tool with respect to SEO which tells the keywords used in your content. It also tells different variants for a keyword and its significance in search rankings. Now you will ask what is meant by variants?
Variants are set of two or more than two keywords having similar usage. You might have seen that when you search something on search engine using a specific term, you see that some words which were not in your query are also highlighted bold in search results. These keywords are called variants because Google and other search engines show similar results for them.
For example I own a site which is rich with keyword blog. It has 6 variants according to Webmaster tools which include blog, blogs, blogging, blogger, blog's and bloggers. You can check variants for any keyword by clicking on that keyword. It will give information which keywords are good for your SEO so you might target them.
C. Remove URLs:
You can use this tool to tell Google which URLs of your site should not be included in search results. It means by using this tool, you can place a link of your site in robots.txt file so Google bots will not crawl and index that link of your site.
I have already given a detailed explanation of robots.txt above so no need to blacken the page anymore.
So this explanation to Google webmaster tools and their usage ends here. I have tried to cover all major and important aspects of SEO related to Google webmaster tools. This will surely help you in getting some good rankings in search engines and optimizing your website or blog.
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