How Google Webmaster Tools Can Benefit You
Keeping up with traffic trends, click through rates, error pages and potential malware issues are important responsibilities of any website owner, and without the proper tools, keeping up with these things can be time consuming and frustrating. Google has made this process easier by providing webmasters with a suite of reports called Google Webmaster Tools. Keep reading below to learn about the benefits of using Webmaster Tools.
How To Add Your Site To Google Webmaster Tools
Adding your website to Google Webmaster Tools is really easy to do, but before doing so, you have to prove the site is yours. You must be able to access the website’s root folder via FTP, or have access granted you via the website platform if you’re using something like Wordpress or Joomla. Without these required access permissions, you won’t be able to add your site. If you do have them, Google will provide you with a unique file that you will upload either via FTP or through the admin interface of your web platform. After you have uploaded this file, Google will be able to confirm site ownership.
Submitting Your Site
After Google has verified site ownership, Google will then send out its search spiders to the web site to gather data about the site. This process is known as “spidering” the site. If you’re in a hurry, you can speed up the process by submitting an XML sitemap to Google via the Webmaster tools administration panel. The sitemap makes it easier for the Google spider to navigate throughout your website. If you update your website regularly, this XML sitemap picks up the updates quickly and processes these updates within minutes.
Search Queries
Revealing the list of search queries that site visitors are using to discover your website is the most important information Webmaster Tools users have access to. One of the reasons a webmaster may find this useful is because it might reveal searches that you haven’t built a page for. A smart site owner will use this information to build a new page around this specific search phrase such as local seo scarborough. By targeting this phrase with a page of its own, you can often generate additional traffic as a result of this page also showing up when people search for the phrase in question.
Webmaster Tools also shows what position in the Google search engine results your site is being found for each particular search phrase. The higher up your site appears in these results, the more traffic you will receive. By knowing where your site is located in the results,you’ll know whether you need to work on improving your rankings.
Detecting Malware And Removing Unwanted Pages
Detecting malware is another benefit of using Webmaster Tools. Google will scan your site, and during the scan may find evidence of malware on the site. When found, it is often in the form of parasite pages or scripts that have been installed within the site’s file structure, usually without the site owner knowing about it. These pages are designed to take traffic away from your site by directing them somewhere else.
If Google detects malware on your site, they will let you know and give you instructions on how to deal with the issue. After you have cleared the malware from your site, you can request that Google review the site again. This request process also gives you the ability to have Google remove some of your pages from their results due to out dated content or privacy concerns.
Crawl Errors And HTML Errors
Another important report provided by Webmaster Tools is a list of crawl errors. One type of crawl error is the 404(Page Not Found) error. If a webmaster knows about this error, he can either create the page in question, or redirect visitors to an existing page. Taking this step helps keep visitors on the site instead of losing them when they hit the back button to return to the search results.
Webmaster Tools also provides a list of pages that have duplicate content in the site title and site description. Google dislikes such duplicate content, and knowing this information gives you the ability to correct the issue.
Traffic Trends And User Engagement
Knowing how many visitors and how many pages they view is the main reason most site owners install Webmaster Tools on their site. This information is a key metric for measuring the performance of a website, and gives you the ability to see how your site’s performance has been trending over time. One key metric revealed in this report is called “bounce rate”.
Simply put, bounce rate measure how long visitors remain on your site. It is assumed by many that Google uses this information as part of their ranking process, with the idea being visitors will remain on quality sites longer, but won’t stick around on sites of poor quality. Since their goal is to deliver quality results to Google users, you can see how using this metric as part of the ranking process makes sense.
Hopefully this article has provided some insight into why Google Webmaster Tools is an invaluable resource for website owners. By using this resource provided free of charge by Google, you can discover issues with your site that may be holding it back from reaching its full potential.