Google has an enormous range of handy tools for you to use as a way of helping with your SEO and Traffic generation.
All of these tools will help you with your SEO. Google Webmaster Tools can give you some very technical information and provides you with detailed reports about your web pages’ visibility on Google.
You can see what Google thinks about your pages, you can find out the Top Search Terms being used by your visitors and you can check the amount of inbound links/outbound links etc.
You can also submit your site map to Google via Webmaster Tools which will ensure that Google knows about all of your pages. Google Webmaster Tools also lets us control the Sitelinks which are being served in Google results, alerts us to error pages or pages not being properly indexed by Google, and a glimpse into how Google picks up the incoming links to our sites.
Webmaster Tools to work you need to install a small code into your site.
Before using Google webmaster tools you need a Google account and then verify your site. Once you log in to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account, you will see the home page. You’ll first need to click on the “Add a Site” button to get started.
Enter the URL of a site you’d like to manage and click “Continue.” You’re then taken to the “Verify Ownership” page. You’ll need to pick one of the two ways to verify that you’re the website owner. You can add a meta tag to your website’s home page (Google provides the meta tag to use) or you can save a blank file with a certain filename on your website.
Depending on the type of access you have on your website will depend on which verification type you select. If you’re using a shopping cart, it may be easier to add the meta tag into the administration area of your shopping cart, where it allows you to enter meta data. In other instances, it might be easier for you to add the supplied file by sending it, via FTP, it to your website. In either case, you’ll then need to select the “Verify” button when you’re ready.
Once you’ve verified your site, you’ll need to go back to the home page and click on the actual website domain name to get to the Google Webmaster Tools’ dashboard.
Google Web Optimizer:
Website Optimizer is a tool that can help you improve the effectiveness of your website or web pages. By allowing you to Split Test different versions of your website content, you can determine what content best attracts users to lead them to convert on your site. For example you have a page sell products, where you are offering a Free Report in exchange for your visitors Name and Email Address. Using website optimizer you would test two slightly different versions of that Name sell product Page to see which one converts best.
First you need to increase your Traffic, then you need to split test to increase your conversion rate. If you put all your efforts into SEO and none of your efforts into Split Testing some of your SEO efforts will be wasted. For complete procedure you will have to insert a code into your web pages in order to get website optimizer to work. The key to all successful marketing and online marketing is testing and measuring. It is essential to get the most from your marketing campaigns, and without the numbers how are you going to know what’s working and what’s not.
The Website Optimizer report will show the performance results for all the page variations that you created for your experiment. By seeing how well a particular variation performs in comparison with the original and the other variations, you can choose the most successful page to improve your business.
Diagnostic Tools:
The Diagnostic tools are here to tell you about any errors that Google has encountered on its normal or on its mobile crawling sessions. In other words, if GoogleBot came through your site and found some 404 errors, pages that were excluded in a robots.txt, or other faults… this is where you will find out.
The mobile and standard reports provide the same types of information. That is a breakdown of the following errors:
- HTTP errors
- Not found
- URLs not followed
- URLs restricted by robots.txt
- URLs timed out
- Unreachable URLs
- Malware
- HTML suggestions
- Crawl stats
- Crawl errors
Crawl Errors:
The crawl error section of Google Webmaster Tools gives you a number of menu options to assess site crawl problems. At the top you have three main tabs that allow you to view crawl errors found from four different web crawlers: Web, Mobile CHTML, Mobile WML/XHTML, and News. Within each of these crawler tabs a sub-menu is provided that allow you to view errors in: HTTP, In Sitemaps, Not followed, Not found, Restricted by robots.txt, Timed out, Unreachable, and News specific.
Clicking through each of these sections and sub-sections will provide you all (if any) of your crawl errors for each section. What makes this information most helpful is the links provided with each URL that allows you to find the source of the offense. You can see what URLs (both internal and external) that contain broken links.
Malware:
Malware is malicious software that has somehow attached itself to your website such as a virus or spyware. Generally these things don’t get attached to your site without some deliberate intent, but it may be unknown to others if it happens. Google let’s you know if they find any malware on your site.
Crawl Stats:
The Crawl Stats section gives you a very quick at-a-glance view of your site’s crawl history over the past 90 days. The graphs show pages crawled, kilobytes downloaded and time spent downloading on a daily basis. The numbers on the right show the 90-day high, average and low. Look for anomalies, spikes and valleys that you can go back to assess. See what you were doing that may have caused these changes. If they are positive changes you can look to duplicate them. If negative, look to avoid them in the future.
The best part of this one tool is the bottom table that shows what specific page on your site carries the most PageRank. It’s updated monthly, and could be used to measure how successful singular link building campaigns are.
Set crawl rate:
This area of is very informative, as it provides an overview of Googlebot’s activity on your site. Many people view this area and figure it’s useless unless the rare option to adjust crawling speed is enabled. When setting scrawl rate think about the changes or improvements you are going to make to your site like adding new content, launching a link campaign or hosting or rich media content. All of these events may lead to spikes in the graphs. It’s these spikes that you really want to review actively.
For example, if you’re using new resources for backlinks, you can measure how responsive Google is by seeing how those spikes correspond to your efforts. The same holds true if you’re making any efforts at all to improve link popularity of any kind.
The end goal though with these, is to get Google coming in more often, requesting more pages and interacting more with you. That will allow you to get new content indexed and ranked more quickly in the future.
Enable enhanced image search:
If you love to appear in the Google Image search results, you might be able to have some fun with this tool. It’s important to note though, that many have had a poor experience, ultimately losing out on a lot of traffic. The core of the issue is this. Enhanced image search allows you greater control for labeling images that reside on your domain. While that sounds fun and exciting, Google’s trying to make a game of it. Literally.
HTML Suggestions:
This is an extremely useful area of webmaster tools as it provides a few clues as to what on-page optimization issues Google finds important. The page is divided into three sections: Meta description, Title tag, and non-indexible content. At the top of the page Google tells us that the followoing issues won’t prevent you from being found in the Google index but they will affect the user’s experience. It’s also possible they will affect your rankings, though that isn’t noted here.
The first section, Meta descriptions, provides three areas of analysis: duplicate descriptions, long descriptions and short descriptions. Off to the right is the number of pages uncovered that are registering this “problem.” Below this is the Title tag section that provides analysis on missing, duplicate, long, short and non-informative titles.
The title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site pages so this is a section that you really want to pay attention to and correct as soon as possible. The last section shows errors of non-indexible content. If any errors are found, a link will be provided for you to open up a page that contains more information.
Obviously, you’ll want Google to encounter as few errors as possible. Therefore, you should check these reports often to make sure that no problems exist and that all new content is being spidered.
Index Stats:
The index stats are nothing more than a shortcut to advanced Google queries on your site using operators. Shortcut links are provided on the following operators…
- site:
- link:
- cache:
- info:
- related:
Subscriber Stats:
Since much of the world now involved RSS feeds, readers and content syndication – Google makes stats on your feed subscriptions easy to find – assuming of course that you use their feed management systems.
Keywords Suggestion:
The Keyword Suggestion tool for Google will help you choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected key term. Simply enter a key term and this tool will query information from several Google searches, which it will use to determine popular and re-occurring terms used by websites in the same industry.
The relevancy of a key term is determined by counting the number of times a given term occurs. You may notice that on occasion a term has a higher relevance than the term you entered. This is because it appears more often in Google searches related to your term than your input term does.
Google Suggest:
The Google Suggest Tool provides frequently searched phrases based on the letters or words in your query. This keyword suggestion tool generates ten keywords suggested by Google for the search term you provide. Type in a word or part of a word to generate related keywords.
Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is not only useful for tracking the unique visitors to a website; you can also use it for setting goals and even tracking your most popular content. In fact, one of the least common but more important uses of Google Analytics is visitor profiling and benchmarking analysis. This tool will give you a lot of information about your website. It will tell you whether your website is optimized for most popular browsers used by your vistors, about the operating systems being used by your visitors and about the eligibility of your website for opening on mobile devices.
Other comparison that can be deduced from Google Analytics benchmarking cover the following areas:
- PageViews comparison
- Average time on site
- Pages per visit
- New visits
Sitemaps:
Google Sitemaps are what the entire Webmaster Tools were initially built around. Here you can upload and manage XML based sitemap files that catalog all of the pages on your site. Using these XML files, Google can then access all of the pages you’d like for them to. Sitemaps are listings of all of the web pages on your website. Providing the search engines a sitemap may be helpful. It won’t help you rank better, but it will give the search engines a list of pages to crawl.
You should know how many web pages (and how many products) you have. If there is a big difference in the number of pages that you know you have on your website and the number that’s reported in this section, there may be a problem. If that’s the case, then you might want to investigate further to make sure that all of the products that you’re selling are included.
Keyword Research:
While Google offer several outstanding keyword research tools, Google Webmaster Tools enable you to find out keywords that really matter for your actual site. Hugo Guzman has written a good post on how to find your most valuable keywords using it.
The idea is to seek out the low hanging fruit of keywords already ranking on the verge of top 5 and to push them higher via low level SEO to get a high ROI. This is a really neat concept. Usually I’d focus on the big earners, high traffic keywords and important queries. Probably everybody else does as well so by focusing on these “almost there” terms you save time and money not fighting that many competing websites.
Analyze robots.txt:
If you don’t already know about robots.txt, it’s basically a protocol for Googlebot and other spiders to immediately find instructions on what they can and cannot have access to on your site. If you don’t want spiders indexing your images, just disallow them. If you’d prefer not to have certain areas of your site indexed and available for the searching public – go ahead and restrict access.
Here though, you can check to make sure your robots.txt file is not only up to date, but also valid in terms of how it is written. Many times, a simple change on a robots.txt file will force Google and other engines to drop dozens or even hundreds of pages at a time. With that in mind, use this tool whenever you make changes to your robots.txt files.
Remove URLs:
This automated tool is available to help resolve issues on pages that no longer exist or create problems for you by being in the Google index. This tool can be a great way to expedite the removal of information that simply has to go.
Google Map:
Google Maps was not specifically designed for webmaster but it can prove to be a very instrumental tool in promoting your business. By getting your website listed for free in the Local Business Results it can really help you to get traffic to your site. The Google Map Listings often appear above the rest of the free listings on the left of the Google Page.
You can add all your business details to Google Maps via your Google Account including opening times, photos, videos etc. To activate your Google Maps listing you will need to provide a telephone number or postal address and wait for a verification call or postcard.
