Seven Reasons Google Webmaster Tools Is Essential for SEO Part 1
May 24th 2009 5:33 PM
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Google Webmaster Tools optimize your SEO efforts to improve your site’s visibility in Google search. It shows you how a search engine sees your website, so that you can make necessary improvements. It provides you with any errors it is experiencing on your site that reduce its visibility. It shows you how many people link to your website, how it is structured, and many more important details to drive traffic to your website.
This post covers the first four of seven reasons I think Google Webmaster Tools is essential for SEO.
Identifies Critical Website Issues
The Google Webcrawl feature tells you which pages in your website could not accessed by the search engine, hampering your SEO efforts. If your pages are not indexed in Google’s search engine, their visibility and traffic suffers. Some reasons why Google indexing problems occur include:
Keeping the errors in Google’s Webmaster Tools to a minimum will have a positive effect on your search engine optimization efforts.
Keyword Popularity Reporting
The Top Search Queries feature measures your SEO efforts by providing you with two essential reports:
Identifying the most popular search queries lets you spend more of your time optimizing these pages than other less popular pages, vastly improving your productivity and performance.
Your Success In Generating Inbound Links
Google Webmaster Tools provides you with an Overview of Pages that Link to Your Website. This lets you know how your SEO inbound link building efforts are performing. The more pages you have that people link to, the better your website will rank in search engine results. The number and quality of links to your website is arguably the most important factor in SEO.
Meta Tag Optimization
Meta Tag descriptions are very important in Google Search, as they explain to the reader what your website is about in the search results. The more relevant and well written your description is to the reader, the more likely they will visit your website.
Google Webmaster Tools lets you know about meta description issues on your website:
Duplicate meta descriptions reduce the rank and relevance of pages containing them. Short meta descriptions don’t provide enough detail to your readers, and descriptions that are too long get cutoff. Resolve any errors Google identifies to optimize your page title for your web visitors, increasing its relevancy and converting more traffic. Here is an article about meta descriptions that I found helpful called making the most of meta description tags.
Stay tuned for Seven Reasons Google Webmaster Tools Is Essential for SEO: Part 2 coming soon…
Do you use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO? What do you think about it, what are some other ways it has helped you? Please let us know in the comment section below.
[...] Google Webmaster Tools lets you view your website from Google’s perspective. It provides important reports and recommendations to make it more appealing and visible to search engines as well as visitors. In my first post on this topic, I introduced the first four of Seven Reasons Google Webmaster Tools Is Essential for SEO. [...]