Webmaster tools is an essential tool when optimising or administrating a website for a client. The Google tool provides a range of comprehensive information.

Google have introduced new ways of verifying your website in webmaster tools, these include DNS, Meta tags, HTML files and Analytic accounts.

Tutorial

Thanks for watching this weeks SEO video blog, please leave any questions or comments on the supporting blog post.

Improve your SEO with Webmaster Tools.

Like many other free google tools, webmaster tools is an easy to use and effective method you should use to help your SEO. Its will assist you to achieve that page 1 position for your website. Discover how webmaster tools will give you ideas of how you can develop certain areas of your website to improve its performance in the SERPS.

One of the purposes of your internet marketing, is optimizing your site to ensure it gets as many clicks as possible to bring visitors to your site. Learn crucial aspects of webmaster tools and enhance your site to maximise its performance and maximise your conversions.

One of the first things your should do in webmaster tools is submit your XML site map into the sitemaps section under site configuration, as this informs google of all the URLs in your site that need crawling. Once submitted, it will tell you how many of your pages have been submitted, against how many have been indexed and can be found within the search engines. Its an interested aspect of webmaster tools, as it highlights which pages haven’t been indexed so you can take action and look at the architecture of these pages to see if they can be improved to get indexed also, which will improve your SEO.

Check the settings section and ensure that your sites geographic target, matches the country your site is based in. This is particularly helpful when you have a .com or other domain name type which doesn’t indicate the country like .co.uk would. This tells google exactly the location you wish to be primarily associated with and ensures that Google takes your site into consideration for the geographical location that you require when positioning you in the search engines.

See your results in the webmaster tools “your site on the web” section. This is where the best information in terms of value to your SEO keywords is found. Its knowing how to interpret it that is the important part.

The top search queries section is a proven tool for SEO as it shows you all the searches you show up for, in addition to the ones you expect to from your optimisation. It gives you effective insight into how many impressions you site has made under each keyword. There may be some here that you don’t currently optimise for which will give you ideas for new potential keywords. Looking at the average position column you can see if there are any on page 2 that if optimised to get it onto page 1 could bring you more conversions.

These results also show you how many clicks your site has received through each keyword and the click through rates (CTR). CTR’s are the percentages that your site has been clicked on depending on what position it is in the search engines. If you are position 4 and have X amount of impressions for a certain keyword then webmaster tools will tell you what percentage of them impressions resulted in someone actually clicking on your site in the search engines.

This information gets more interesting when you click on the keyword it will show you the difference of what percent your site would get clicked on if it was position 1-3, enabling you to gain insight and take control of what is the minimum position your site needs to be in to reach its maximum potential of visits from the search engine.

You may be at the bottom of page 1 and feel content with that and feel that’s enough for your site to perform but if you then looked at the click through rate for that keyword in webmaster tools, you may see that trends found from google for this keyword is that people predominately only click the top 3 sites then you realise that to receive the rewards deserved, the bottom of page 1 isn’t good enough and that you need to do that extra bit of work on your SEO to help your website reach its potential.

The diagnostics tab within google webmaster tools will enable you to have your site checked for Malware and Crawl Errors. It will show any broken links within your site and any external links that are pointing to a page that doesn’t exist. These errors will effect your SEO and need to be fixed.

In the labs section your can go into site performance to see data on your websites page download speeds. This has become more important and is now being taken into consideration by search engine algorithms . Webmaster tools provides data which enables you to compare the download speeds from month to month of each individual URL within your site. This can help you to understand if changes you have made to content have resulted in slower page download speeds which in turn could effect your page ranking.

The data also informs you of whether your site downloads slower or faster than your main competition which can answer certain SEO queries you may have about your sites performance in the search engines.

The help offered by webmaster tools for your SEO doesn’t end with just telling you if your page loads too slowly, you can click on the individual results where it then offers you information on each URL and how the download time can be made faster to help you compete better with your competitors in the search engines.

There are other aspects to webmaster tools but these are the main ones that will easily guide you into taking control of your website and its potential in the search engines. Take action and try looking at you site with these effective methods and see an improvement in your websites results.

The SEO Department here at Creare always submit our sites to Webmaster Tools and utilise the benefits of Google’s Local Business Centre. These free tools from Google are great, Webmaster Tools gives us data about interesting stuff like crawl errors and if a site has duplicate meta tags, title tags etc. Local Business Centre is fantastic for local searches, and for area specific SEO it is a definite must.

What’s changed in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools has been a favourite place of mine for diagnosing problems with sites. It is now even better, with the addition of search results’ clickthrough data, which can tell you how many times somebody clicks on your site when they find it in their search results for a particular query. As well as all this it also tells you which pages are showing for each particular query.

This information is particularly useful for ‘Conversion Optimisation’, something that is extremely important for SEO. You can use the information to your advantage because if you know where problems are you are in a much better place to fix them. For example, it may be that your meta description needs to be improved, to increase the clickthrough, or it may be that your page title is turning people off from clicking on your link when it appears in the SERPs.

What’s changed in Local Business Centre

Well, the name for a start… Google have renamed Local Business Centre to… Drum Roll here please… Google Places. Yes, another name to remember (though I just refer to it as ‘Google Maps’ to my customers to avoid confusion), but it now has many more useful features such as:

• Service Areas – This is going to be extremely powerful and useful for any company that covers areas beyond where they are based. Also, if you are ‘working from home’, and there are many internet based business run from back bedrooms, you can now keep your address private. This has always been a stumbling block for us here at Creare, as we always prefer to put our customers on Local Business Centre (sorry, I now mean, Google Places), but when they work from home they often say, quite reasonably, ‘But, I don’t want my home address online!’ so we have to leave it off…
• Advertising with Tags – this one may not be useful yet in the UK as it is only available in a few cities as yet, but to give you the low-down: You can pay Google to highlight your listing in google.com maps results and in Google Maps. Whether they are beneficial remains to be seen though, so if I were you, I’d hold off until it’s been tested by someone else!
• Business Photo Shoots – You can get Google to take photographs of your business – though you can still upload your own photos. Personally I’d prefer to have control over my own pictures, but I guess if you want to take advantage of this, it is free, so why not…?
• Customised QR Codes – these will become more valid in time. The are a bit like barcodes but you use your smartphone to scan them. You can print them on your business cards, and other promotional material, and when the smartphone scans them you are sent to your Google Places page. Nice, eh?

Another new feature in Google Places, is information about who is searching for you, how they find you, and where they come from. All useful stuff methinks…

Script: Welcome to this weeks SEO Video blog, we are going to take a look at the Google labs feature within ‘webmaster tools’.

Google has introduced 4 features, these include ‘fetch as Googlebot’, ‘Malware details’. ‘Sidewiki’ and ‘Site performance’.

We’re going to take a closer look at the labs in this weeks tutorial.

Fetch as Googlebot - This is designed so that you can see how your website appears to Googles bots that crawl your website. It does take a little time, but you specify which page you want to simulate and then it gives you ability to view the results.

Essentially you want to see a lean version of your website, without the Googlebot’s finding any unwanted information.

Malware Details - If you site has been hacked and is being used for Malware then Google can identify this allowing you to take action, as you can see Creare Communications has no malware detected.

Sidewiki - The Google sidewiki allows users contribute helpful information towards any webpage. With the option within webmaster tools allows you to add a site owners comment, you can see this when you go to Creare Communications and click the side wiki button on the Google tool bar.

Site Performance - This shows the performance statistics for your website, The idea is to improve the performance of the website by analysis the information shown in this section.

You can see that it says that on average Creare Communications takes 2.2 seconds to load and that 63% faster than other sites on the web, which is a helpful statistic and helps puts things in perspective.

It also breaks the information down into a graph, which shows the load speed over the past months and the speed of some of the main pages on your website.

Thanks for watching, if you have any questions or comments please leave them on the Youtube channel or supporting blog post.

News : Keyword User Interface, this provides a list a specific keywords that Google has found while indexing your site. Google claim this is excellent for finding out if specific sites have been hacked and your site has started to appear for random keywords. Buy clicking the keyword, you get a list of URL’s that the keyword appears on.

We think it also allows you to see whether a particular phrase you are optimising for has been optimised to the full potential and more importantly that Google recognizes that the keyword is related to your site.

Tutorial: Webmaster tools tips

That are worth analysing are:

• Top search queries
• Crawl errors
• Links to your site
• Keywords
• HTML suggestions - Duplicate Meta data

Showcase: This weeks showcase is SEO Spyglass link analysis tool, you can find the free demo at http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/. We will have a look into this more in next weeks tutorial.