Google Webmaster Tools Simple Tutorial

Google Webmaster Tools is a free online toolkit provided by Google to website owners. It provides important information to website owners related to their website(s) which allows them to better optimize their websites to attract traffic from search engines.

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Registration and Verification

Anybody with a website can sign up for and use Google’s webmaster tools. After signing up users will have to verify each website they add to their account by added a generated html file to their web server or by adding a special meta tag to one of their pages. Once verified users can configure many options related to their site such as how often they want Google’s bots to index their pages, stop certain pages from being indexed, set a preferred format to represent their domain and so on.

Diagnostics, Statistics and Linkage

After registration and verification it will take a few weeks for sufficient data to be collected about your domain but after this waiting period you will be able to access detailed information about your domain. Web crawl errors will point you to troublesome pages which are missing, unreachable, timing out, or returning errors to Google’s crawlers. Top search queries and clicks for domains are displayed so that website owners can track their SEO progress and optimize their content. The Index Stats display the various pages already indexed by Google while the Crawl Stats display average pagerank of your pages while noting the page with the highest rank. Subscriber Stats show a link to any RSS feed or any other form of syndicated content found on your pages by the crawler and the amount of users subscribed to them through Google’s services such as Google reader. The very important links tab allows you to view links within your site as well as links from other sites that point to pages within your website.

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Screen shots of Help Page, Homepage and Dashboard

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a file which lists links that are available for crawling on a domain. Some websites have a special page where all links on a site are listed where users can go to better navigate the pages available on a domain, but technically such pages are not sitemaps although they do allow easier access to domain links by site users and search engine bots. Google Webmaster Tool’s supports the adding of text, XML and even RSS sitemaps to a domain listed as long as it is verified and the sitemap file is listed in the root area of the domain. For Example:

http://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml - correct placement of sitemap

http://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml - incorrect placement of sitemap that will return an error

Help Centre

Visit the excellent Webmaster Help Centre to find help any issues related to Google Webmaster Tools, adding sitemaps or getting your site listed in Google’s search engine.

September 15, 2007 | Filed Under domain management, general, search engine optimization, tools and resources 

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