Basics of Google Webmasters Applications and SEOPosted by Wilder Emerson on May 13th, 2021 Make full use of Google webmasters tools For those of you who've a website of your and have not made use of the Google webmaster tools, let me tell you that you have doomed your website to oblivion so far as the search engines are concerned. If you're not getting any traffic to your site, it is possibly as you have not made use of the best SEO tool out there on the web. Before you begin to dish out plenty of hard earned money on SEO companies, I would advise you to obtain yourself acquainted with it now and that's what this article will concentrate on. Google webmasters tools in itself is a very complicated in the sense, there are too many variables to deal within the complete webmasters toolbox. I will only hover over the most significant and required aspects of using the webmasters tools to be able to zone in on the crucial internet search engine optimizing nature of it rather than the whole website in detail. Setup a merchant account - Now! Firstly, if you do not have a Google account, I would advise you to create one and the log in to the Google webmaster tool website. And let's assume that it is the first-time you are logging into the site, you will be required to add your site. After you have added your website to the webmasters account, you will be able to see a screenshot of your index page at the very center of webmasters tools. It might take up to fortnight before you could see a screenshot of your website nevertheless, you can begin utilizing the tools at your disposal immediately. You will also be asked to verify that the web site belongs to you. This could be done by clicking on the manage site to the right of your website and simply clicking verify. I would suggest uploading an HTML file to your domain root folder and clicking on verify. I have found this the most effective and the easiest way to verify your site. Put in a sitemap - submit your URL's to Google Click on your website to access the Google webmasters tools dashboard. You could first start off by adding a sitemap in xml format. This is often achieved by various means e.g. even some alternative party websites provide the service of creating a sitemap for you. Or you could look up how to develop a sitemap in Google if you fancy your likelihood of creating it yourself. Once that's out of the way, you can determine if your pages have already been indexed by Google. Remember Google may index only the pages it sees as providing valuable user experience and overlook the rest. Though you also have the choice of manually submitting the web site pages and URL links by using the 'fetch as googlebot', I strongly suggest that you use the sitemap submission for greater results. In this manner, googlebot will know exactly how to maneuver through your website to attain certain pages. Look for site errors and correct them Next on the dashboard, I would advise you to check on the crawl errors beneath the health tab. This should be done on a very regular basis, since an unhealthy website is seen as a non-functioning website and thereby overlooked by most search robots, including googlebot. Check to see if your website has returned any URL errors on the last googlebot crawl. If so have them fixed. Craawl errors section usually mentions site errors, such as robot.txt error when you have not uploaded a robot.txt file to your server already. Beneath the URL errors, you mainly find the access denied, not found rather than followed. To fix these errors, you could head to dashboard>Optimization>Remove URL> and create a new URL removal request. Once submitted, you can get back to the crawl errors you have rectified and mark them as fixed. Make sure you visit the crawl error page regularly to make sure that your website stays healthy. Google Webmaster Services and Meta tags Another tool in the optimization tab is the HTML improvements. This will inadvertently suggest any html improvements that your website may require. This can are the Meta title tags, the description tags, and the keyword tags however, not limited to them. It is pretty basic and the improvements can be achieved by yourself assuming you have a little bit of html knowledge yourself, or you could have your website designer or developer look after these to improve your websites chances in the overall appear and feel for the googlebot. Though there are lots of other features contained in the Google webmasters tools website that you could use to optimize it for search engines, if you have started off with the basics, I am certain your website will stay healthy and may get you the traffic that you deserve. These are the very basics that you should be aware of and practice to ensure that your website to stand a chance of showing up browsing engines.Like it? Share it! More by this author |