Do I really need Google Webmaster Tools?
We recently wrote a blog series on redesigning your website and all the strategies and techniques you can employ to create a website that is SEO optimized and fully functional for the user. If you have gone through all the hard work of a redesign yourself, but have no idea if your efforts were even worth it, then you need Google Webmaster Tools. Google will crawl through your site and create a report telling you what it did and didn’t like about you site. Now who wouldn’t want that kind of information! And what’s even better, it’s free.
There are some major advantages to installing Google Webmaster Tools. The first being that it shows you which keywords are driving traffic to your site. If you are getting heavy traffic from a particular set of keywords, then it is to your advantage to create fresh content or a blog post revolving around those targeted keywords and get even more traffic to your site. These keywords will tell you what people are searching for and you can implement these phrases into your content, driving traffic to you, not your competitors.
Perhaps you have some shady links coming in to your website, but had absolutely no clue they were even there. Google will let you know there is a problem and you can immediately correct it. No one wants harmful links coming in to their site. As Google indexes your site, it checks your meta tags and descriptions. If you have duplicates, then it is harder to index correctly and Google will alert you of this problem.
All websites should have a sitemap, which describes all the content on your site and tells Google how often to index it. If Google has any problems with the sitemap, it would be pretty handy to know about it and if you have the Webmaster Tools, you most certainly will! You’ve been hard at work creating all sorts of great content that you hope is climbing the search results. Without any kind of tools, it’s a bit hard to know, but Google Webmaster Tools will certainly help you.
Now that we’ve talked about some great advantages of Google Webmaster Tools and we have you properly convinced that you need them, we’re happy to tell you that it’s easy to install. You will need a Google account (which you more than likely already have) and once you have an account, go to the Google Webmaster Tools set up page and click “add site”. You will need to verify that you are indeed the owner of the site. This can be done through an upload of a HTML file, link it to your Google Analytics account, add some information to your homepage, etc. Google will offer several options to prove the website is yours and once you have done that, you are up and running.
Google Webmaster Tools is an asset to any business owner. It will find any problems when it crawls your site and let you know immediately. This can be a lifesaver to ensure that your pages are loading correctly and quickly, keep track of keywords and any that are appearing more as spammy keywords, be on the lookout for unwanted links, broken links, etc. The Webmaster Tools is your fairy godmother in the world of the internet, so don’t hesitate, take action.