Google Webmaster Tools – Most Essential SEO Asset
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Google Webmaster Tools – Most Essential SEO Asset
Google Webmaster Tools are the essential tools for any webmaster to monitor website functionality and SEO results. By utilizing webmaster tools we can find broken 404 pages, dead links, we can see who links to us, what search queries are getting us traffic, and what rankings we have for those queries. These are all essential information for any webmaster or SEO company. Let’s go over a few basic functions of Google webmaster tools that will help you improve your website, but we first have to install it.
Installing Google Webmaster Tools
First thing you need to do is create an account with Google, assuming you don’t have one already. Visit Webmaster tools website and log in. You will see an empty panel, and in the middle will be a button called “Add a site.” Click on it and type in your domain name.
After that you will be brought to a verification page. In order to verify your domain you have four options:
- Add a meta tag to your site’s home page
- Link to your Google Analytics account
- Add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration
- Upload an HTML file to your server
The last option is the easiest one and most secure. You just need to download an HTML verification file and then upload it to your root domain using FTP panel or FTP client like FileZilla. Once the file is uploaded, click on “Verify” button and you will be taken to your control panel. It will be empty for the first 24 hours, after that you will start seeing search queries that brought people to your website, some backlinks, and you can run diagnosis to see if there are any internal errors on your website. One thing I suggest you do right away is add a sitemap to Webmaster Tools. Just click on the “Site Configuration” menu in the left sidebar, then “Sitemaps,” and then “Submit Sitemap.”
How to Find 404 Pages
One thing we definitely don’t want on our website are broken pages. Imagine the scenario, a person browses a website, sees your link and clicks on it, and once the browser loads the page the page is empty, nothing there. Not a great experience and most likely not a returning user. At the same time search engines are not that fond of 404 pages as well.
To find your broken pages you need to visit the Diagnostics section and access Crawl Errors. You will be brought to a page with all the pages that can’t be accessed for various reasons returning various crawl errors. The one you need to look at is “Not Found,” which is what 404 is. On that page you will see all of the pages that return a 404 error and the pages linking to them. Now you can edit the links pointing to those pages or correct the issues with the pages themselves. The usual issue is that you moved the pages but left links pointing to the old page, so you created broken links. This way you can correct them to point to the new page.
Blocking Search Engines from Indexing Duplicate Content
The second most common issue us duplicate content. There are plenty of ways to tell the search engines to ignore duplicate content, like 301 redirects, canonical tags, and of course telling search index not to index them at all.
To avoid general duplicate content issues the first thing you should do is let Google know which domain you prefer, WWW or no WWW, example:
http://www.yourcoolwebsite.com
http://yourcoolwebsite.com
This way Google will know that a page on the WWW domain should be considered as priority and the same page on your non WWW domain will be ignored. Of course this can easily be avoided by setting a simple 301 and setting your preferred URL with your hosting company. In Webmaster tools you can set that by visiting “Site Configuration,” Settings,” and then choosing your preferred domain. Make sure you verified both WWW and non WWW domain if you want to do this.
If there are only certain pages you wish to exclude from the search engines, you can use robot.txt, but the easiest way is to exclude those using Webmaster Tools. Go to “Site Configuration,” “Crawler Access,” then “Remove URL.” On the new page you can add the URL’s that you would like to exclude from the search engines, and thus avoid duplicate content issues.
If you have an e-commerce website or any website that creates dynamic pages, than you most likely have a problem with duplicate content. You can set parameters to be ignored in Webmaster Tools. Visit “Site Configuration,” “Settings,” “Parameter handling,” and set your desired parameters. For example if you want to exclude pages containing “sessionid,” include the wanted session id as the parameter and Google will handle those pages as being the same as the original page.
Webmaster Tools can help you in many ways, removing broken pages and broken links will help your website’s usability and will help you keep a lookout on wasted link juice. Also, to maximize your content you need to remove duplicate issues, which is very easy with webmaster tools. Don’t forget to experiment and get to know Webmaster Tools and Analytics, they are the first line of attack when it comes to search engine optimization.
Zarko Zivkovic works for Dejan SEO Company as an SEO Strategist and link building team leader. You can connect with Dejan SEO and Zarko on Twitter.
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