Ways to connect with Google Webmaster Tools

The Webmaster Tool is a free tool provided by Google which aims at providing all the data related to your website. It is very important to analyze the business before implementing any strategy. Assumptions in business may not be the right thing to do. Have a look at the analytics and make the desired changes. Follow the below guidelines to begin with Google Webmaster tools:

Create an account:

It is obvious that one needs to sign up at Google webmaster site to add the site. It is absolutely free and doesn’t need any credit card details or pay-pal details. Go to your google account and verify the link for your webmaster account to be active.

Add your website:

Place your site URL to begin the process. The link has to be verified and you can do it in 2 ways. You can upload an HTML file to your server or sign in to your domain registrar and add a new DNS record. Once your website is verified by Google, the data can be seen. You can go to the dashboard and have an overview of your site. It will give you a complete gist of the traffic, number of users, real time users, impressions, clicks and so on. You can also download the report for your reference.

Sitemap Generator:

Your website might have many pages and all the pages must be crawled. There are possibilities that couple of pages might be left out by Google. To avoid this, one can use Sitemaps. Sitemaps indicates the total number of URLs in your website that has to be crawled by Google. One has to submit it both in XML and HTML format. One can use XML Sitemaps to generate the Sitemaps. Just enter your homepage URL and click start. The Sitemaps will automatically be uploaded and you can easily know the number of URLs that has been indexed. If any of the links have not been crawled, you need to have a check on the content, keywords, title, description and other SEO related things.

Internal Linking:

Internal linking will fetch more traffic to your site. It will also tell you which page is the most popular among the others. It will also reduce bounce rate and will give an option to the users to toggle through different pages on your website. Internal linking will also help you to get higher page ranks apart from appearing in the search engines. If you are a blog owner or have a separate blog page and wish to now the data about it, check under subscriber stats section. It will tell you the most subscribed blog posts and you can decide your articles based on it. One can also track the RSS growth using feed burner.

Keyword checking:

If you are looking for relevant keywords for your business, it is always better to have a check with Google. There are certain keywords which are ranked higher by Google depending on various factors. Check for the keywords under keyword section and you will be shown a list of relevant keywords. This section will also show the significance of each keyword. Pick them up depending on your business profile and relevancy.

Malware:

There are possibilities that your site might be attacked by viruses though there may not be any fault from your end. Google will not rank any infected websites as it will harm the users also. Thus, it is better for you to check the Malware vrius and clean it up completely. Go to diagnostic center and check the Malware status.

Crawl errors:

If your website has any error it will appear as crawl error. This indicates that Google is unable to find that particular page. 404 is the most common website error. Ensure that you have redirected your old URL to the updated one by using 301 redirection code. Check that you haven’t received external links from dead pages. This will also affect your site rankings. The crawl stats will reveal all the info related to indexing.

Checking the new features:

Google constantly tests and launches the new features. If you like experimenting with new features, check the labs sections. ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ will tell you how a page appears to Google. The way Google sees a page is different from the way a user sees it. Just feed your URL and GWT will show you if they could see it or not.

Site Performance:

This is the crux of any website. We all need to know the performance of our site. The load time of any site is very essential. There are high chances that the users’ might leave the site if it takes a longer time to load. The lesser the loading time, the higher is the traffic. The site performance option in GWT will tell you the loading time and you can take a step accordingly.

Hope this article has been useful to you. If you are yet to start your Webmaster account, hurry up, you might be losing something important.