When we make a comparison of various SEO tools, we find that Google Webmaster Tools ranks top in terms of usability. Although, it doesn’t come with the kind of perks that paid SEO tools offer, still we can safely use it because it’s a Google product. Plus, it comes loaded with tons of indispensable SEO insights. When we look at the usability aspect we find that employing this no-charge web service for SEO is not a bad idea at all.
A snapshot of Google Webmaster
It’s an effective toolset designed for use by webmasters. You can use this tool to liaise with Google and tweak countless aspects, to be in-line with how Google looks at your site. With the help of this amazing toolset you can catalog the external and internal links to your site, alter the crawl rate to get deep and frequent crawls, analyze keywords typed by users to reach your site, plus click through rate for each keyword, and an array of other useful things.
Using Google Webmaster
First of all register for Google Webmaster Tools. After finishing the joining formalities the next step is to run-through the verification process, to confirm that you legally own the website. There are many options to confirm ownership. Either download an HTML file and upload it to the root directory of your site. Or put in an HTML tag to your home page to confirm that you have access to the source files. Yet another option is via Google Analytics (provided you are operating the same Google account for Google Analytics).
Google Webmaster Tools for Daily Usage
After you have placed the Google code on your site and finished verification, you get the go ahead to exploit the benefits of this awesome toolset. Log into your account – and click your site’s ”URL” link to access the site dashboard. Here you’ll see clickable links to all the main sections – Index Status, Structured Data, Search Queries, Links to Your Site, Crawl Stats, Crawl Errors, Sitemaps, etc. Click one of the links to open the individual section.
Search Queries
In this section you’ll see a list of keywords that drove people to your website. If you have done your optimizing well the keywords in the list will match the keywords you are optimizing for. Additionally, you’ll have access to good keywords, which you didn’t know existed.
Links
The ‘Links to Your Site’ is one of the handy sections of Google Webmaster Tools. This section gives an account of your backlinks (internal and external), your pages that are linked from other domains, and also shows a list of anchor text phrases used to link to your site.
Crawl Errors
The Crawl Errors section sets out the errors Google bot ran into while crawling your site. It displays data pertaining to unreachable pages, missing pages, server errors, and a host of issues that didn’t let Google accurately crawl your site. In the Crawl Stats page you can view date related to pages crawled per day.
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