What Is Google Webmaster Tools?

May 11, 2010

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service from Google that lets you gain information about your website and how Google sees it. It is an important part of any search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.

It’s extremely easy to use and is a vital tool in ensuring your website is performing as well as it should be. It also informs you of any issues that Google has with your site – giving you the opportunity to fix them, ensuring your site stays in Google’s good books!

So what can Google Webmaster do?

• It lets you check and set the crawl rate
• It lists internal and external links
• It gives you statistics about how Google indexes your site
• It allows you to submit an xml sitemap
• You can generate and submit a robot.txt file
• You can set a preferred domain – telling Google what you would like your site to be listed as
• See what popular keywords are being used to access your site and where your pages rank for those terms
• See any errors Google has come across while crawling your site

We will be giving more information on what these mean and how you can interpret the results to help improve your site in a future blog post.

You can find Google Webmaster here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

You’ll firstly need to log into Google Webmaster with your Google account (if you don’t have a Google account you can easily create one here). You’ll then have to add your site to Google Webmaster and verify it – if you’re unsure how to do this, don’t worry…

…our next blog post will outline how to add and verify your site within Google Webmaster.

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Tags: (SEO), Google Webmaster Tools, Online Marketing, search engine optimisation