Linking your website up with Google Webmasters tools is one of the first steps for any person trying to get their website found on Google. Some of you may know what it is and others may have not heard about it at all. I just wanted to give everyone a basic overview of the important things webmasters can provide.
- Indexing your website: In order to index your pages in the fastest and most efficient way, you need to tell Google about each and every page on your site. You can do this by creating a sitemap.xml (list of each URL on your website) and submitting this list to webmasters. Google now has a list directly in front of them that they can more easily crawl through. This is extremely beneficial as Google can also understand each time you build your website with more pages.
- Search Traffic: As you submit your list of pages, you should start to notice that you are popping up for more and more keyword searches. Besides doing searches yourself, Google Webmasters provides “Search Analytics”. Here they can provide us with a variety of search terms we are ranking for and the total number of impressions we are getting. As time goes on, you can pull up a three month overview and a line graph of impressions should show a steady increase.
- Crawl Errors: When ranking a website, Google looks at the usability and ease of access of the site from a user experience. If you have pages or links into your website that are broken, this causes annoyance for users and Google doesn’t like this. While Google crawls your site, they are nice enough to provide us with a list of pages that they have found errors with. Simply look under “Crawl Errors” in webmasters to find this information. With this list of URLs that are coming up with 404 errors, we can simply redirect them to other live pages on our site.
Webmasters tools is useful for just about anyone. Utilizing these three aspects of the program can only help you and your website push towards the top of page 1!