In our final post about Google Webmaster Tools, we explain what all the reports mean and how you can use some of them to help improve the performance of your website.
Dashboard
- Tells you a summary of your key reports – search queries, crawl rate, keywords, sitemaps and links to your page
Site configuration
- Sitemaps– this page will show you what sitemaps you’ve uploaded, how many indexed URLs it contains and if there are any issues with it.
- Crawler access– if you’ve added a robots.txt file, this is where it’ll be. If you haven’t, this is where you can generate one. A robots.txt file is a list of URLs that you don’t want Google to index. This would be useful for private, out of data or duplicate content.
- Sitelinks– sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. If you have any, you’ll be shown them here.Change of address – this page tells you what to do if your website is going to move to a new domain.
- Settings – this is an important page. Here you can tell Google what country you are targeting which is important if you only work with customers in one country. You can also set what your preferred domain is: either http://www.SMEketing.com or http://SMEketing.com.
Your site on the web
- Search queries- here you’ll see a similar graph to those within Google Analytics. You’ll see how many impressions your site had and how many clicks. You’ll also be able to see what keywords people used to find your site – how many impressions those keywords created and how many clicks resulted. You can also see your average position for these terms. It’s important to remember that this tells you how people are finding your site at the moment – if you are optimising your site for a particular keyterm, but are not yet ranking well for it, it’s unlikely to show up in this report. This report is useful in telling you where you can direct a little bit of effort to get improved results – if you are ranking 4 or 5 for a keyword you know converts well, with a bit of extra effort you could improve his rank and massively improve click throughs.
- Links to your site – Here Google will tell you the number of links pointing to your site. It’ll also tell who what pages those links point to. Like most websites, the homepage will normally have the most links. Not all of these links will be great quality – link building is all about quality over quantity (although having a huge quantity of great quality links is the ideal!). This report will help you see if you have important pages with a low volume of links pointing to it – so you know where to direct your link building activity.
- Keywords- If you’ve done your keyword research you should have a good understanding of what your website should be optimised for. This Keyword report tells you the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. The terms at the top are those which are mentioned most often. These should match the terms you’ve optimised your site for. If there’s an important keyterm that’s not reflected in this list, you need to go back and amend your copy (although remember, no keyword stuffing!! Keep keywords to within 3-5%). If you click on one of these keywords, it’ll show you what pages of your website this term appears on.
- Internal links – This report tells you the internal links you have to each page. Internal linking is an important part of SEO. Your most important pages should have the highest number of links pointing to them. The volume of links should go down for less important pages.
- Subscriber stats – If you have an RSS feed associated with a blog, news page or any other page, this report will show you how many people are subscribed to them.
Diagnostics
- Malware - Malware is a piece of software, such as a virus or spyware that can attach itself to your site. You should see the message “Google has not detected any malware on this site.” Call your IT guys if you’re not getting this message!
- Crawl errors- This report tells you if Google has found any problems whilst crawling your site. The most common issues would be 404 pages not found and broken links. However, this report can often show pages/links that dont’ exist anymore. It’s not a great report in terms of accuracy. If you want to find broken links on your site, visit Xenu at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
- Crawl stats- This graph shows you your site’s crawl histroy over the last 90 days. It shows you the pages crawled, kb’s downloaded and the time spent downloading on a daily basis.
- HTML suggestions – This is a useful area. It’ll tell you if Google has found any issues with the content of your site or with the title tags or meta descriptions (notice it doesn’t mention meta keywords here… that’ because Google doesn’t pay attention to them anymore!).
Labs
- Fetch as Googlebot- You can request to see pages as Google bots sees them – without any snazzy design, pictures of any of that bumf! You can use this to check that Google is seeing your site in the way you want it to.
- Site performance - Google is beginning to place more importance on the load speed of your site. People don’t to wait ages for a webpage to load, so Google is starting to place preference on faster loading sites. This report gives you a nice looking graph showing how your page download speeds have averaged over the last few months.
So that’s Google Webmaster Tools explained. It’s best if you spend some time clicking about and exploring the reports. It’s pretty easy to use and can give you some excellent information to help improve your site’s performance. Even though this is Google Webmaster Tools, making changes to improve your site will also help its rankings in the other major search engines.
Find out more about Google Webmaster Tools: