Beginner’s guide to Google Webmaster tools

In order to check SEO health of your website, it is advisable to add your website to Google Webmasters or Google Search Console. You can add your website to Google Webmasters by:

1. Copy the URL of your website.

2. Visit Google Webmasters Tools. Sign in using Google credentials.

3. Select ADD A PROPERTY.

4. Specify the URL of your website and select Continue.

5. Select a verification method to verify your domain.

6. Paste in your website URL in Add a property dialogue box.

7.Select GoDaddy in Domain name provider.

8. Accept to Confirm Access.

9. Google webmasters will verify your domain.

10. Select Continue once the verification is completed.

It’s recommended to sign-up for Google Search Console, formerly Webmasters tools. It lets you know how your website is doing in search results. You can inspect the SEO health of your website on its dashboard. Use the dashboard to review how many pages have been crawled and indexed, see a list of crawlers and identify any HTML improvements Google recommends for you. It shows you what content you need and what not on your website, informs you if there are any spams or malware issues your site is having. It gives you a bird’s eye view of how your website is doing in search results, and how other websites are linking to your website.

Armed with this data, you will have the ability to improve the experience for both your users and work for your SEO.

It’s pretty easy to set it up. Sign-up for free at http://www.google.com/webmasters. You could use your Google account that is associated with business and used to set up analytics and other Google services. If you don’t have an account, you can set it up here by following the instructions.

Select Sign in Search Console.

Once you log in, you would see a list of website that you own and manage.

If you want to check SEO health of your new website, or optimize its performance, or instruct it on how to crawl your website, you need to add it here. You can add them by clicking the red ADD A PROPERTY button from top RHS. Copy the URL of the home page of your website or blog, and paste it in the Add a property dialogue box at Google Webmasters.

Here, you need to verify that the property you are adding at Google Webmasters is a domain that belongs to you. This is a very important step to prevent misuse of websites. Google provides various ways to verify this:

  • Upload an HTML file provided by Google to your website or blog.
  • Add a specific meta tag to your source code.
  • Tweaking your website’s DNS record through domain name provider.
  • Syncing with Google Analytics.
  • Syncing with Google Tag Manager.

Since we purchased the domain from GoDaddy, we have selected the “Domain name provider” method. Once the verification process is complete, select Continue. The website would be added to Google Webmasters. Clicking on the website thumbnail would take you to its Dashboard.

From the Dashboard, you can control and oversee the SEO health of your website using different options available in Search Console on the LHS.

1.Messages – In this section, you can read messages, warnings, and alerts.

2.Search Appearance

(a)Structured Data-

Structured data presents an overview of rich snippets and microdata on your website. This can help you diagnose technical errors on your websites from a structured data perspective and help identify areas of improvement.

(b)Data Highlighter

Data Highlighter helps you add structured data code to your website, without even accessing the dashboard or code. Let us see how you can use this feature.

(c)HTML Improvements

HTML Improvements section contains suggestions from Google to improve the HTML code of your website.

(d)Sitelinks

In the Sitelinks section, you can tell Google what sections of your website should not be displayed in Google Site link sitelink, and specify its URL here to demote it.

(e)Search Analytics

Search insights provide details of the organic search performance of your website on Google. You can get data-driven insights for Search and filter them on the basis of Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search Type and Dates. You can further classify the search metric as Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Position. You can also see the average position of your site rankings for a certain period. You can also identify landing pages being returned for search queries, and vice versa. Sitemaps are one of the most important areas in Search Console. Here you can submit your sitemap.xml file for indexing to Google. For the same website, you can submit multiple different sitemaps for videos, images, and mobile as well.

3.Search Traffic

(a)Links To Your Site

In this section, you can identify other external websites driving attention and traffic to your own website. This information can help you plan out page optimization strategy.

(b)Internal Links

In this section, you can see a detailed report for internal linking on your website. These are hyperlinks on your own website or blog, connecting and pointing to different landing pages of your website.

(c) Manual Actions

In this section, you can find a list of pages on your website that are not compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines and have been flagged by a human reviewer. Google can detect the majority of spam and demote it automatically. For the rest, Google uses human reviewers to manually review pages and flag them if they violate the guidelines. Flagged websites can be demoted or even removed entirely from Google search results. The Manual Actions page lists known issues on your website and provides information to help you address the problem.

(d)International Targeting

If you want to make sure that search results display the relevant language and country version of your pages to people from different countries, you can specify them here.

(e)Mobile usability

The mobile usability report identifies pages on your site with usability problems for visitors on mobile devices.

4.Google Index

In this section, you can see total URLs of your website that have been indexed by Google over time. In the Advanced tab, you can identify URLs you are blocking, and URLs that have not been indexed.

5.Crawl

Here you can identify problems or issues Google bot may have had crawling certain pages of your website. It is very important to diagnose the crawl errors highlighted in this section, and rectify them to get better search rankings.

You should remove pages that are not part of your website anymore.

(a)Sitemaps

Sitemaps is one of the most important areas in Search Console. Here you can submit your sitemap.xml file for indexing to Google. For the same website, you can submit multiple different sitemaps for videos, images and mobile as well.

(b) URL Parameters

In this section, you can indicate the purpose of the parameters you use on your website to Google. The preferences that you set can encourage Google to crawl the preferred and selected version of your website URL or simply prevent Google from crawling duplicate content on your website.

Note: Change the values here only if you are sure how parameters work. Incorrectly excluding URLs could result in many pages disappearing from search.

For example, if you are the owner of an international eCommerce site, you might tell Google that you use the country parameter to distinguish between pages dedicated to consumers in different countries. Then you can set preferences for Google might crawl the URLs that contain those parameters.

6.Security Issues

If there are any security-related issues, like malware or hacking attempts, they would be listed here.

7.Other Resources

The resource listed in this section can further aid you to improve your website’s SEO health.

Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life.

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Apurv Chaturvedi
Entrepreneur, Branding and Digital Marketing Evangalist.

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