The Webmaster Tools for Google are free tools that are very useful for web masters to use when trouble shooting SEO of their sites.
This is easy to use, and all a website owner has to do is prove they own the site and they get immediate use of this set of tools and data to help them optimize their sites through SEO.
The following are five Google Webmaster Tools hints:
1. Crawl Stats
Crawl Stats give web masters data on what Google has been crawling over the past three months. The info contains three sections:
Number of Pages crawled each day: It’s great if you see this go up and even though there are normal peaks and lulls, a site owner can see trends as well as sudden spikes where new pages or links were created.
Number of kilobytes crawled each day: This chart is similar to the Page crawler above with the same peaks, lulls and data.
Amount of Time spent downloading a page: This chart is not the same as the two above and if it shows a lot of high points then you should check to see if there are any server problems in your area as pages shouldn’t take forever to load..
These statistics are great for troubleshooting any issues and telling how well your site is working.
2. Not Found Errors
Not found crawling errors are handy for SEO purposes. If visitors are surfing your site for and find broken links they won’t come back. This tool, which is located on the top right of your dashboard, will show you all the broken links so you can fix them. Sometimes Google lists old links and not broken ones, so double check before you attempt to fix them all. Don’t worry so much about having no errors; just use it to optimize your site.
This tool also shows broken links from other sites besides yours. That’s good also for SEO. You can use it to find backlinks that are broken and fix those so they work. This way you get more links and a better page rank.
3. Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
Google Webmaster Tools gives you a listing or URLs that have issues in either the meta or title tags. It shows duplicates or those that are too long or too short. It can show you this data in the diagnostics section. If you have double meta titles it’s not good for SEO and makes your page rank go down, plus all of your good meta titles and tags should be written so they are specific to the content on your pages.
4. Top Search questions
Even though it’s possible to find the top search questions using Google Analytics or another similar tool, the Webmaster Tools also gives you the average place where Google ranks you included in their info. That means you can see what top search questions were directed to your site. This helps you to decide on proper keywords you should be using to get more traffic.
5. Site Links
If your website has a listing of links under its Google listing, the site link section inside the Site Configuration can be used to manage the links you see. It’s not possible to ask Google what links to out there but it will let you block the ones you don’t want.
These are only some of the variety of tools Google Webmaster Tools and Google have and they sometimes add new features. Try them out for yourself, especially if you are new using these tools to see all it can do for you. If you do use it all the time, let us know what ones you use the most.