This is a follow up article to the blog we posted a couple of weeks ago: “The Ins and Outs of Google Webmaster Tools & How It Can Help Your Website (Part 1).” Follow along below as we delve into the next tool sets available in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account.
Your Site on The Web
We will start with the reporting tool set named “Your site on the web” located in the left column of GWT. Under this next section you will find information about search queries, links to your site, content keywords, internal links and subscriber stats. The search queries report provides a great deal of information regarding search terms on the web that resulted in impressions or clicks to your website. It provides a good snapshot as to the keyword terms that are being associated with your website. If many of the keyword queries are closely related to your business than you are in good standing. If you find that many of the keyword queries have nothing to do with your business than you might need to re-think your overall SEO and content strategy.
The “Links to your site” report provides data about the websites that link to you the most and the content on your website that has the most links pointing to it. This is good data for website owners because it provides you with an idea of the websites that currently link to you. The next report we suggesting using is the “Content Keywords” report. This report provides information on the keywords used across your website, its variants and what Google thinks is the significance of the keyword to your website. You want your target keyword phrases to have many variants and to be considered very significant to your overall website. If not, then you should work on creating more content with your target phrases on the website. The last resource we will cover in this section is called “Internal Links.” You want to make sure that you are not only building inbound links, but that you are also setting up links between your internal webpages. This is a great way to make it easier for viewers to quickly navigate your website and for search engines to easily connect and catalog your content.
Website Diagnostics
The “Diagnostics” section of GWT provides in-depth information regarding the overall health and performance of your website. You can easily check to see if there is any malware that has been added to your website, if there are any crawl errors and HTML suggestions for your webpages. The tool that you will find to be the most useful to keep your website clean and healthy is the one named “Crawl Errors.” We recommend exporting any crawl errors that are being found in the report and sending them to your web developer. They can set up permanent 301 redirects to take care of the majority of crawl errors that your website might be experiencing. We suggest checking this tool every couple of weeks to make sure you don’t have any new crawl errors. The “HTML Suggestions” is also helpful for quickly seeing if there are any recommendations for improving your SEO meta tag information.
We have only touched upon the primary GWT tools for website owners and website developers, but please take the time to review all of the resources available within your GWT account. Contact Bop Design if you have any questions regarding the health of your website.
