I wanted to talk about Google Webmaster Tools for a minute. If you have not taken full advantage of all that GWT has to offer in your Internet marketing

efforts, I strongly recommend you do.

First, you should create a central Google cccounts account and this way you can access all of Google’s tools, like GWT, Analytics, Adsense and more at: Create Google Account

Always submit your sites and sitemaps to GWT once they are complete. Forget all the crap you hear about “let the SE’s discover your site on their own.” This is stupid and you don’t have to wait. Google wants you to submit to them, they ask you to and recommend that you do, see it here.

Add Your Sites to GWT here

Besides submitting your sites for indexing and crawling, GWT offers lots of valuable tools to analyze your websites and their performance in Google, as well as detect any problems that may occur with them.

OVERVIEW TAB

In overview you can see how often your site is crawled and more important you can see the INDEX STATS.

Benefits: You can see which webpages are indexed, the current cache of your site, links to your home page and more.

DIAGNOSIS TAB

Web Crawl

Let’s you see any problems that Google had with crawling specific pages on your site, URL not found, HTTP errors and more (It will show those you blocked by robots.txt but you can ignore those).

A couple of days ago, Google announced a great new feature added to this section called “Linked From“, this will show where the source URL that the broken pages are being linked from, both externally and internally. Learn more about this feature at Google’s Webmaster Blog.

Benefits: Allows you to see real accessibility problems with your website pages that you need to address to make sure those webpages are indexable and working properly.

Content Analysis

Shows potential problems with Meta Tags and duplicate Meta Tags that may be occurring on your website pages. This just proves the point I hammered in Complete Guide to Meta Tags, that Google does pay attention to those. Contrary to some people’s beliefs that they are worthless, they need to be personalized and customized for EVERY page of your website.

Benefits: Allows you to optimize Meta Tags and shows you those you may have missed, as in duplicate Meta Tags.

STATISTICS TAB

Top Search Queries will show you 2 things:

1. Traffic – What keywords are being used by searchers to find your site

2. Impressions – The top 20 search queries in which your site appeared, and the percentage of the top 20 queries represented by each search.

Both of these also show your position in SERPS for those keywords/search terms.

Benefits: Essential analysis of what keywords your site is showing up for and ranking in.

What Googlebot Sees

This one is very useful and will show you 3 Things:

1. Anchor Text Phrases in External Backlinks to your site!

2. Keywords appearing ON your site

3. Keywords used in anchor text in external links to your site

Benefits: Huge benefits! Allows you to be sure your website is optimized for the keywords and phrases you want it too. Seeing anchor text phrases and keywords to make sure you are anchoring correctly in your backlinks for the keywords you want to rank for.

LINKS TAB

Pages with External Links:

This is a great one and shows you numbers of as well as all the pages on your site that have external links pointing to them.

Benefit: This is good for analyzing where you need work on building more deep page backlinks for your site. Remember when link building it is important to link not only to your home page but also to deep pages as well, learn more at: Article Marketing Backlink Techniques

Pages with Internal Links:

This one is to analyze your internal link building for on-site SEO. Remember that linking internally to pages within your own site is very important, not only for allowing Google to relate your pages with keywords but also to lower the bounce rate and allow for easier navigation for your visitors. Google wrote about good internal link structure on their webmaster’s blog just this week.

Benefits: Huge! Allows you to make sure that internal link structure is optimal and where it may need work.

OTHER TABS

Sitemaps

This is where you can see any errors or warnings about your sitemap that Google found. This is important analysis for indexing your site pages correctly.

TOOLS TAB

The Tools Tab has lots of features. A couple of important ones to be noted are:

Analyze Robots

Check your robots.txt file and if Google was able to access it without problems.

Set Preferred Domain

Here you can set how you want your domain to display in the index. You can set all occurrences of your domain to be either http://www.yourdomain OR http://yourdomain (without the www).

Benefits: This is important because people will link to you in different ways so, if you set a preference, you let Google know which URL you prefer and avoid any duplicate content issues that may occur.