Are you a website owner? If so, then you must know about Google Webmaster Tools. It’s not just one more thing to learn and do – it will help you improve your site, understand its visitors, monitor its performance, and more.
And the best part is that Webmaster Tools is free! So what are you waiting for? Use this article to find out all there is to know about this awesome service from Google.
1. What is Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tool is a completely free tool offered by Google that helps website owners manage and optimize their sites.
Webmaster Tools offers lots of useful information including the search queries people have used to find your pages, statistics on how many visitors you get from different parts of the world (by country and continent), what percentage of them are new or returning visitors, and more.
It also helps you diagnose any problems with your pages (like robots.txt errors or issues with displaying content ), provides an easy way to verify ownership of the domain that’s associated with the site, lets you track potentially problematic incoming links, and much more!
2. How to Sign up for Webmaster Tools
Signing up for and using Webmaster Tools is a piece of cake.
When you visit the Google Webmaster Tools website, on the top right part of the screen, you’ll see a link saying something like “You need a Google Account to use this tool.” Click on that link and it will direct you to the login page.
From there, you’ll be prompted to create a Google Account if you don’t already have one.
If you do have an existing account, then use your username and password to log in and continue. And that’s it – you officially own a Google Webmaster Tools account!
3. Why You Should Use It
There are several reasons why you should seriously consider using Webmaster Tools to manage your site. Here are the main ones:
You can always sign up for and use it for free! It’s really easy and convenient – you don’t have to go anywhere or create any other accounts.
You can do practically everything from this one tool – diagnose problems, get data about the visitors to your site, make modifications to how it’s displayed, and more.
4. Features of Google Webmaster Tool
Here are some of the key features that Webmaster Tools offers:
Google Index Status Page
This is where you can see in real-time what pages from your site Google have crawled and indexed (or not). You can also see the same data on an order basis.
You’ll know exactly how many times each of your pages were crawled and this will help you avoid any misunderstandings with Google as to whether your pages are actual content or not.
Sitemap Reference
This is where a sitemap for your website needs to be submitted so that the search engine can use it to easily index all the pages that are on your site.
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This is necessary for large and complex sites to ensure that every page gets indexed without any problems.
Manual Actions
In this section, you can manage any issues that Google might have detected with your site.
If you’re using content (or other material) from another website (whether it’s yours or someone else’s), then there is a chance that the search engine may decide to penalize your site for this practice, so you might want to make sure that your site doesn’t get penalized.
You can also submit a Sitemap Change Request if you need to modify or update the sitemap for your site (for example, after moving it from one server to another).
Crawl Errors
If Google has detected any problems with your site and the pages that it has crawled, then you can get more information about those issues here.
Traffic
In this section, you’ll see data such as the number of visitors that have come to your site from each country on Earth (and which parts of Earth they’re from) and for how long they spent browsing various pages.
Similarly, you’ll be able to get information about your visitors by the operating system, browser, and device.
And you can use the data that you see here to better optimize your site for specific devices or browsers, so it’ll perform even better in Google search results.
Conclusion
Google Webmaster Tools is a great way to stay on Google’s good side. It doesn’t cost anything, it takes just a minute or two to set up and you can use it whenever you want – there’s no need for you to be online at any specific time.
Furthermore, by using the tool, you can quickly diagnose all kinds of issues that might be affecting your site, and you can take action to fix them.
Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool that every website owner should have in his or her arsenal.
It’s free and it offers top-notch data for optimizing your site – I’d highly recommend taking the time to set up an account and start using it right away.