Most people running a website or a blog quickly understand two things… Google is important to your success and SEO is important to your success.
Many of us spend countless hours and energy in finding ways to boost our SEO. In the past it seemed everyone was figuring out ways in which we could “trick” or manipulate Google into giving our sites better search engine rankings. Truly this is how it once was. A whole multi-million dollar industry grew out of this SEO manipulation.
The boffins at Google are SMART and they have evolved their systems and algorithms to the point where this artificial manipulation is easily picked up and easily penalized. Our SEO strategies today need to be about what Google wants, allows, and recommends. So what does Google want?
Have you tried Using Google Webmaster Tools for your SEO?
If you’re like a lot of other website owners, you have yet to fully value what Google Webmaster Tools can do to help you with your site’s SEO. That’s something you’ll want to fix right away!
What better place to find out what’s wrong with your site than where it matters most, Google. After all, they are the ones dealing out the search rankings, and it’s useful to know what they think about your pages.
Rather than bombard you with the entire suite of tools, here are 4 of the most useful ones to get you going!
4 Great Google Webmaster Tools reports to inform your SEO
HTML improvements – The HTML Improvements report is definitely a handy tool indeed for SEO. It can show you things you need to be aware of, like how well or even if your Meta data is optimized, title and descriptions deficiencies, along with duplicate content issues. Well worth a look.
Search Queries – The single most useful report by far, Search Queries returns loads of data including impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate, keyword terms searched, image and video SEO and a lot more. The keyword section only goes back for 30 days, but it does give you some data you can plug into other tools.
Crawl errors – This report will tell you which pages are returning a 404 error code, that is, not found. These you’ll want to take care of as quickly as possible, because you are losing traffic, and your search engine results may be skewed as well.
Links to your site – This one returns a list of sites that are linking to your pages, and will show you what pages are drawing the most interest. This can be, and often is, quite surprising, as pages or content you may not have thought was significant could possibly be drawing loads of traffic to your site!
There really is a ton of data available to us within the Google Webmaster Tools. Guessing at how Google “sees” our site and how they value our sites in terms of their search index is a thing of the past. If we consider the data and feeback given to us by Google withing their Webmaster Tool, we can go a long way to enhancing our SEO efforts.
