How to Utilize Google Web Masters

Isaiah Bollinger

Isaiah Bollinger

If you own a website than you are going to want to make sure that Google is properly indexing and crawling your site. Google Web Masters is an excellent tool for understanding any problems that exist with your website, especially regarding how search engines are finding and attempting to understand what your website is about. Therefore, this tool is essential if you want to run a successful SEO campaign for your website, something every website owner knows is critical to getting found on the web.
Google Web Master Signup

Getting Started with Google Web Masters

I suggest using the same Gmail for your Google Web Masters, Google Analytics, Google Places, and Google Plus for your business because it will connect everything and be easy to access all under one email.  Once you have signed into Google Web Masters with your Gmail it will ask you to verify your domain.  This can easily be done by adding a HTML Meta Tag to your site, logging in with your domain name provider, proving ownership of Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager Account.  You only have to verify with one of these methods. I suggest using Google Analytics because this is something you should have done already to begin with.

Google Web Masters Domain Verification

Utilizing Google Web Masters

There is a wealth of information on Google Web Master Tools and knowing what to look for and when is critical in determining your sites performance.  You can find out how many pages of your website Google has indexed, if you have any URL errors, and where your search traffic is coming from.

Search Appearance

Structured Data:  The first part of search appearance is structured data.  This allows you to add in html markup tags into your site in order to inform Google in more detail about structured data on your website.  What is this useful for?  This is helpful for things like schedules of sporting events, hours of operation, product taxonomy and things that will help Google get a better understanding of structured pieces of data on your website.  This isn’t a feature that all web masters need to utilize but can very beneficial to certain types of businesses that have a lot of structured data.
Data Highlighter:  Data highlighter allows you to inform Google about structured data with simple mouse clicking so that you do not have to go into the code to inform Google.  This is a great alternative to providing Google with data about your sites reviews, products, articles, and other structured data.
HTML Improvements:  HTML improvements allow you to see what meta descriptions and title tags are not optimized for Google’s standards.  This way you can be sure that all of your pages have unique title and Meta descriptions that fit into the character limits of Google which are 70 for Title Tags and about 155 for Meta Descriptions.
Sitelinks: Sitelinks are automatically generated links that may appear under your sites search results as shown in this example. You can use Google Web Masters to demote sitelinks that you do not want to show up under your websites search results.  As you see below, AngelList has 6 links below its search results and can choose to not display certain links if it wants to through Web Masters.
Site Links Web Masters

Search Traffic

Utilizing the search traffic feature on Google Web Masters is a great compliment to Google Analytics because you can really dive deep and compare the two analytical tools to see where you traffic is coming from and look for areas of improvement.
Search Queries: You can see all of the search queries you are showing up for per month by impressions and clicks.  You can also see the CTR (click through rate) which is the percentage of people that click on your site after seeing an impression.  It also tells you your average position in the search queries which is invaluable for getting a better idea of where you are really coming up on Google.  All too often do I hear business owners telling me I rank number one, well maybe for your computer and IP address, but each result is personalized to that specific IP address, so you need to look at your avg position not just your computers search results.
Search Queries Web Masters
Links to Your Site:  Links from other sites pointing to your site is one of the major aspects of search engine optimization.  Seeing where your links are coming from on Google Web Masters is a great way to evaluate your backlinks to get an idea of what you need to do from a back linking perspective to rank higher.
Internal Links: Internal links tell you how many internal links you have going between your website on each page.  You want to have as many useful internal links as possible, making this a great tool to see if there are enough internal links on each page or too many.
Manual Actions: The manual web spam page portion of Web Masters alerts you if Google believes that there are any malicious or spammy tactics going on with your website.  They say this only happens on less than 2 percent of sites, but if it happens to you, be ready to fix what Google is telling you because they will drop you from search results if they believe your site is linked to any spammy or malicious behavior.

Google Index

Index Status:  The index status is pretty straightforward and gives you a graph of how many pages of your website are indexed by Google on a month to month basis.
Google Web Masters Index Status
Content Keywords: The Content keywords aspect of Google Web Masters lets you know what Keywords they are indexing and at what frequency they appear on your website as should below.
Remove URLS:  The removals sections lets you remove URLs from your website that you do not want indexed which can also be done in the Robots.txt file.

Crawl

Crawl Errors: Crawl errors are critical to making sure that Google is not having a problem going through your website.  If you have any crawl errors you should make sure you fix them immediately.  Most often you will get 404 errors of page not found. This means there is either a broken link or you need to redirect a page that is no longer available in the htaccess file. It could also be another problem, so make sure to find a web developer available who can solve any crawl errors if you do see them.
Google Web Masters Crawl Error
Crawl Stats:  Crawl Stats tells you how many pages Google is crawling on your website per day, which is broken down in graphs.
Fetch as Google: The fetch as Google page lets you see if Google bot can access a specific page on your website.  This tool is useful if you have a bunch of new pages that you want to get indexed by Google more quickly by submitting it to Google index.
Blocked URLS: This will tell you if your Robots.txt file is blocking the URL’s you want it to block so that Google does not crawl pages you do not want being indexed.
Sitemaps: The sitemap features lets you submit your website sitemap to Google so that it can index all of your web pages properly. This is something that should be monitored on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often you update your website.
Google Web Masters Sitemap
URL Parameters: This is a more advanced tool used to help Google crawl your site more efficiently by telling Google how to handle parameters in your URL’s.  In most cases Googlebot should be able to figure it out but if you have duplicate content on multiple pages and other things that Google should be aware of it can help to let them know so they only crawl your site more efficiently.
Security Issues:  This section will alert you if Google believes there are any issues with the security of your website.
As you can see from the above features in Google Web Masters, there are many invaluable tools for having your website show up on the number one search engine that generates almost 70% of all search queries.  This makes this a critical tool for utilizing on a monthly basis for your website.

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