Google Webmaster Tool: Why and How for your Website

Google Webmaster is one of the free web tool offered by the Google to all webmasters. By using it we can improve our website ranking in the Google search result i.e. SERP. It also offers some variety of functions to the webmasters both for advance users and beginners. One more tools that can be use with Google webmasters is Google analytics by which you can find various traffic details about our website.

Why to Use the Google Webmaster Tool for Your Website?

Google webmaster tool offers the following different functions:

1. Check search queries which brings most of the visitors to your site.
2. List of inbound and outbound links to your site (with dofollow or nofollow information)
3. Sitemap submission for better visibility.
4. Generate Robots.txt file and removes certain URLs from SERP.
5. Check and adjust crawl rate and statistic about crawling of your site by Google.

The above list is too short to explain the features of Google webmasters features. Now it is confirms that using the webmaster tool offered by the Google is very useful and we should use it for website or blog.

How to Use the Google Webmaster Tool for your Website?

To enable the Google webmaster for your website you need to follow the simple procedure.

Step 1: Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and click on sign up for new webmaster account. Enter your Google account details and click OK.

Step 2: After sign up click on ADD SITE. Enter URL of your site and press next then you will reach to following page.

In this step you need to verify your site ownership. If you are on a self hosted WordPress site then just download that html file and upload to your website (either use FTP or directly by login to your hosting control panel).

Step 3: After verifying your authorship with the site now you will reach the webmaster dashboard page. As shown below

In this dashboard you can see number of options. Now you are successfully sign up for you Google webmaster account and you can use it to improve the site performance in SEPR.

Overview of Different Tools Offered by Google Webmaster Tool:

Details of Some Important Features Offered by Google Webmaster Tool:

1) Sitemaps:

What is sitemaps?
Site-maps are nothing but an index to your site content just same as any book has index in which we can see and search the content of the book very easily and effectively. In the same way sitemap tells the search engines about your site content.

How to create sitemaps for your website?
There are many free and premium tools available over internet to create sitemap for your website. There is a website http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ by which you can generate the sitemap for your site free. Just put your site address and keep all things untouched and generate. Download the sitemap in .xml format. Or you can use a free WordPress plug-in “WordPress SEO by Yoast” by which you can generate sitemaps automatically after each and every fresh post on your site.

How to Submit the Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool:
Generating the sitemap is not enough to get better ranking and visibility in the search engines but you need to submit it to webmaster tool. First upload the sitemap you generated to your site root folder such that suppose the name of sitemap is sitemap.xml then it should be uploaded to www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Then go to “Site configuration –> Sitemaps”. Click on “Submit a Sitemap”. Give the sitemap address and click on submit. Now you have submitted the sitemap successfully and Google will start crawling your site according to URL submitted in the sitemap.

2) Crawler access:

This option lets you to see your robots.txt file and if your site has content that you don’t want Google or other search engines to access then you can block that pages from it.

3) Crawl rate:

Crawl rate is the rate at which Google bots will crawl your suite content for availability and for new content being posted. You can adjust crawl rate but it is recommended that it should be default as set by Google.

4) Diagnostic:

• Malware:
  It checks your hosting for any malware present.
• Crawl errors:
  Issues Google encountered when crawling your site.
• Crawl Stat:
  It gives the graph of pages crawled past 90 days.
  
• Fetch as Googlebot:
  By fetch as Googlebot you can see exactly how a page appears to Google. If a URL is successfully fetched we can submit it to Google search.
• HTML suggestions:
  It gives the html suggestion for your website like “Duplicate meta descriptions”, “Long meta descriptions”, “Short meta descriptions”. These issues won’t prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but considering and removing them may help your site’s user good experience and performance.

How to Use Google Webmaster Tool to Improve Your Website Speed?

If your site is faster then user can browse it in the very less time and they will quite obviously browse more pages of interest so it will help you to decrease the bounce rate. It is most important factor in determine your website quality by Google.

Recommended Reading: 10 Surefire Tips to Make your Site to Load Faster.

1. Check your site performance:
   It can be access by going to Google Webmaster Tools –> Dashboard –> Labs –> Site Performance.
   It will show the page loading time of your website and also page load time in history can be monitored. From this you can make correct judgment of your website loading time and it is important before going to start any improvement analysis.
2. Check individual URL speed which takes most loading time:
   Below the above graph you can see the performance for certain url inside your site, so you can expand it and observe actually which url or JavaScript causing errors. If possible it can be avoided and any alternative can be use.
3. See HTML suggestion for your web pages from Google’s point of view:
   It can be access by going to Google Webmaster Tools –> Dashboard –> Diagnostic –-> HTML suggestion.

   

   By correcting these errors you can increase quality of your website and also the site performance which was our aim.

If you have any additional points, doubts, suggestions or anything you are always welcome to comment here.

This is a guest post by Tushar Thakur. He is MU Engineering student and interested in electronics and computers. He is blogging at How to Tech as a part time blogger.

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