Using Google Webmaster Tools

The Google Webmaster Tools provides you an easy-to-read dashboard and set of tools so that you can identify problems with your site and optimize your website for the Google search engine.

Getting Started

1. Go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. If you don't have a Google account yet, create one. Otherwise, log in!
2. Once you're in, you'll see your Webmaster Dashboard. Normally, you'd see all of your websites listed out and whether or not they've been verified and if a sitemap has been uploaded. Of course, if you haven't added website yet, you can do that easily by entering in your URL at the top and clicking on the 'Add Site' button.
3. To add a Sitemap, click on the 'Add' link next to your site. Submit the sitemap that you should've created from the previous section on sitemaps.
4. To verify your website, click on the 'Verify' link from the dashboard. Follow the instructions on the Google Webmaster Tools site to verify your site through either adding a meta tag to your home page or by uploading a new web page. By verifying your site, you'll get access to more comprehensive statistics and information about your site.
5. To get to the real goodies, click on your site name on the Dashboard page.

Overview & Settings

• In the overview, the main thing to keep an eye is the web crawl errors. Keep an eye on these -- probably the most important one is the 'Not Found' error which means that you have a amissing page.
• In the Settings section, you'll probably want to set the Geographic target to the United States. If you have a physical location, make sure to sign up for your free business listing on Google Maps as well. The rest of the settings should be good at their default values.

Diagnostics

Web Crawl

The Web crawl section will give you more details on any errors that were listed in your overview. Make sure to take care of any of these.

Content Analysis

This section will tell you how you did with your titles and descriptions. Follow their suggestions to make your pages have better page rank.

Statistics

The statistics section will give you a good idea of how people are reaching your site and how your site is indexed by Google.

If you have people linking to your site, the 'What Googlebot sees' section will show how they refer to your site. If the links are not descriptive, contact them to change the links. It does make a difference.

Tools

Robots.txt

To generate a robots.txt file, click on the 'Generate robots.txt' link. This is a text file that search engines look at to know what files and directories are off limits. I know what you're thinking: Why would you want to block the search engines? You may have a test directory, FTP folder, a certain type of file type, etc that you don't want available for the general public.

Even if you don't want to block anything, you'll still want to create a robots.txt file. The default robots.txt explicity allows ALL search engines access to EVERYTHING. After you create your robots.txt with the Google tool, download it to the main local directory of your website, and then upload it to your live site.

Make sure to use the 'Analyze robots.txt' link to check your robots.txt after you have it uploaded.

404 Pages

Google has a great 404 widget that you can install onto your website to allow for web page suggestions & even a search box for pages not found. This will make your site so much more usable!

Next Step: Google Analytics