Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools

Before going into details, let us firstly understand what is Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console. Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that helps you evaluate and maintain your website's performance in search results. Offered as a free service to anyone who owns a website, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a conduit of information from the largest search engine in the world to you, offering insights into how it sees your website and helping you uncover issues that need fixing.

Google Webmaster Tools also allows to know if your site is infected with malware. Google Webmaster Tools is a really valuable instrument for SEO. It gives you at a glance data about all important SEO aspects of a site, such as keywords, links, crawl errors, etc. The Google Webmaster Tool (Or Search Console) is a totally free and vitally valuable service offered by Google to all website admins.

How GWT can help monitor your website's performance

1. It verifies that Google can access the content on your website.

2. GWT makes it possible to submit new pages and posts for Google to crawl and remove content          you don't want search engine users to discover.

3. It helps you deliver and evaluate content that offers users a more visual experience.

4. You can maintain your website without disrupting its presence in search results.

5. It allows you to discover and eliminate malware or spam problems that may not be easily found          through other means.

Build Structured Data

Structured data is coded using in-page markup on the page that the information applies to. The structured data on the page should describe the content of that page. You should not create blank or empty pages just to hold structured data; nor should you add structured data about information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate.

Structured data is on-page markup that enables search engines to better understand the information currently on your business's web page, and then use this information to improve your business's search results listing.

Links to your site

The second very useful section of Google Webmaster Tools is the Links to Your Site section. Here you can see where your backlinks (internal and external) come from, as well as the pages they are linking to. As with other link checking tools, don't expect that every single link to your site is displayed but nevertheless this list of backlinks is useful to check from time to time. One of the advanced uses of the Links section is to disavow links to your site you deem harmful. Links from bad sites can hurt your rankings, so if you want to get rid of them, follow the instructions in this article.

Crawl Errors

The Crawl Errors section shows the errors Google bot encountered on your site. The data you get is similar to what you get when you use the Spider Simulator and it shows inaccessible pages, missing pages, server errors, and all sorts of problems that prevented Google from correctly crawling your site. You also get some other crawl stats (such as the number of pages crawled a day) that are useful to know.

Keywords

Similarly to the Search Queries section that also deals with keywords (but it is the ones users type to get to your site), the Keywords section also shows keywords. However, the difference is that here you see what keywords (and their significance) Google has found on your site. The two lists (of keywords users type and the keywords Google finds on your site) could be very different, which means you are not optimizing for what users are searching for. The Keywords section also allows to see the theme of your site, which post Panda has become even more important.

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

Also, your sitemap can provide valuable metadata associated with the pages you list in that sitemap: Metadata is information about a webpage, such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other URLs in the site.

You can use a sitemap to provide Google with metadata about specific types of content on your pages, including video and image content. For example, you can give Google the information about video and image content:

1. A sitemap video entry can specify the video running time, category, and age appropriateness rating.
2. A sitemap image  can include the image subject matter, type, and license.

       Hope you got an idea on Google Webmaster Tools and how to help monitor your website's performance.You can also read my blog on on-page optimization.

                                                                                                                           Asha MK