Google Webmaster Tools for Beginners

Why use Google Webmaster Tools? What does it do compared to Google Analytics?

Google Webmaster Tools gives you very valuable Google search rank information, including -

1. The top search queries that returned your site as one of its results. It also shows your Google search rank for each of those searches. In addition, you can access information on which searches resulted in clickthroughs to your website.
2. All websites that link to your blog or website. This information is provided by page so you can quickly see which pages within your blog have the highest number of external links, and what those external links are.
3. The most common keywords that Google search associates with your website. This will give you a quick idea of whether you are hitting all the keywords that you want. If not, you can rework your articles and then use Google Webmaster Tools to track those changes.
4. Crawl errors and crawl statistics from Google search on your website. This will help you fix broken links and show you how often Google search is analyzing your website.

Google Webmaster Tools provide you with Google search information on your website. This is in contrast to Google Analytics which provides you with website visitor information. If you run your own website or blog, you want to use both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

Signing up for Google Webmaster Tools is really simple. All you need is a Google account, which you should already have if you use Google AdSense or Google Analytics. Just click on the Google Webmaster Tools site, and log into your Google account.

1. After you log in, you will see a button for adding a site. Click on the Add a Site button.

2. Enter in your blog URL or your website URL and click on Continue

.

3. At this point, you will need to enter some HTML code into the homepage of your website. This usually means the index.htm, index.html, or index.php file in the main directory of your website.

If you are using a WordPress blog, then open a new browser window and log into your WordPress administration area -

a) Click on Appearance >> Editor on the left of your dashboard.
b) Select the header.php file on the right of the screen.
c) Insert the meta code provided by Google right above the </head> tag in the file.
d) Click on the Update File button.

[Refer to the screen-shot below]

Note - there are other ways to insert this meta code into your WordPress blog. If you are using child themes, then just insert the meta code into your dynamic styles function.

4. After entering the meta information, go back to your Google Webmaster Tools window and click on the Verify button.

If you have entered your meta information correctly, you will be directed back to your Google Webmaster Tools homepage, and the site you just added will now appear below the Add a Site button.

5. Click on your new site entry to access its Google search information. Initially, the amount of information may be limited. It may take some time for Google to crawl your site and update your information and search statistics.

If you are using WordPress, an easy way to generate a sitemap for your blog is by using a plugin. Two popular sitemap plugins include -

• XML Sitemap Feed - This plugin is very easy to use. It automatically generates sitemaps for your blogs and you don't have to adjust any settings. I use this plugin on my WordPress multi-site blogs.
• Google XML Sitemaps - Google XML sitemaps is a more comprehensive plugin and it allows you to set what types of files you want to include/exclude from your sitemap, frequencies, priorities, and more. This makes the interface a bit more complex, but gives you more control over your sitemaps. Note - the current release 3.2.4 does not support WordPress multi-site. There is currently a beta version that supports multi-site capabilities, so this will likely make it into the next release.

Once you have installed one of these plugins and generated your sitemaps, make sure to submit it to Google through your new Google Webmaster Tools interface.

1. Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account.
2. Click on the Site configuration link to the left of your screen. Then click on the Sitemaps link right below it.
3. Click on the Submit a Sitemap button and enter your sitemap URL. Your blog sitemap URL is usually the main URL of your blog + /sitemap.xml.

After submitting your blog sitemap, it will take a while for Google to find it and upload it. Once submitted though, Google will automatically upload updates from your sitemap file without any further work from you.

Once loaded, you can see the number of URLs submitted by your sitemap, and the number of URLs currently in Google's search index.

If your site is new, it may take a while for Google to index your pages. As a result, the number of URLs indexed may be 0 or very low. Once Google starts to index your pages, this number will automatically rise.

I have also observed that sometimes, my number of indexed pages drops to 0 in Google Webmaster Tools for no discernible reason. This was most likely due to maintenance or update issues.

If this happens, I do the following -

1. Check that my pages are still indexed by entering the following into Google Search.
   site:www.mysite.com
2. Using the site: operator will show you all the indexed pages of a particular domain.
3. If your links are still indexed, then the 0 links is likely just an update error. You can resubmit your sitemap to make sure that your link numbers get fixed.

Usually my link numbers are fixed when I check it the next day.

Make sure that your blog or website is compliant to Google search by following Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Here are two important guidelines that jumped out at me -

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

~~[Excerpt from Google's Webmaster Guidelines]

We often pay a lot of attention to optimizing our pages for search engines, and forget about our human readers. Remember that it is our human readers who click on our ads and buy our products. Here are some simple ways to optimize your blog for your human users.

Also read through Google's articles on site ranking and site listing. These articles contain a lot of useful information on how to enhance your website or blog and increase its Google search rank.

Congratulations on your new blog and have fun with your new Google Webmaster Tools metrics!

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