Complete Guide for Google webmaster tools

1
SEO Guide for Google Webmaster Tools
2
Contents

• Introduction Google Webmaster Tools
• Verification
• Site Dashboard
• Site Messages
• Site Settings
• Search Appearance
• Search Traffic
• Google Index
• Crawl
• Malware
• Additional Tools
• Labs

3
Intro Google Webmaster Tool

• Google's Webmaster Tools are essential for any
  strong SEO effort.
• It helps you see your website as Google sees it.
• The toolset gives you insights into what pages
  have been indexed on your site, what links are
  pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and
  much more.
• A site that's active in Webmaster Tools has a
  better shot at being fully indexed and ranking
  well.

4
Verification

• Before you can access any data on your site, you
  have to prove that you're an authorized
  representative of the site. This is done through
  a process of verification.
• There are five main methods of verification
  currently in place for GWT.
• \

5
Verification Methods

• The HTML file upload. Google provides you with a
  blank, specially named file that you just have to
  drop in the root directory of your site.
• HTML tag. Clicking on this option will provide
  you with a metatag that you can insert into the
  head of your home page.
• Domain Name Provider. Select your Domain Name
  provider from the drop down list and Google will
  give you a step by step guide for verification
  along with a unique security token for you to
  use.
• Google Analytics. If the Google account you're
  using for GWT is the same account as for GA, is
  an admin on the GA account, and you're using the
  asynchronous tracking code, then you can verify
  the site this way.
• Google Tag Manager. This option allows you to use
  the Google Tag Manager to verify your site.

6
Site Dashboard

• Now that you're verified, you can log in and
  start to examine the data for your site.
• The first screen you'll see is the dashboard.
  This gives you a quick view into some of the more
  pertinent information for your site, along with
  any new messages from Google.

7
Site Messages

• When Google wants to communicate with a
  webmaster, this is the place they'll do so.
• There may be messages that inform you that you
  have pages infected with malware, unable to
  access the website, they've detected a large
  number of pages on your site, which may be an
  indication of other problems.
• Not all messages are bad. Sometimes we can get
  congratulate msg that we have an increase in
  traffic to one or more of your pages.

8
Settings

• Clicking on the gear icon in the top right gives
  you access to the tools that formerly resided in
  the Configuration menu item.

9
Site Settings

• Here you can tell Google some things about your
  site if you're not able to tell them in other
  ways.
• If you have a .com site, hosted in India, but
  it's targeted to the US, there aren't too many
  signals to the search engines that that's your
  intention. In this tab you can set your
  geographic target to the UK, which informs Google
  of your intentions for this site.
• You can also set your preferred domain whether
  you want the site to show up in the search
  results with the www or without the www.
• The crawl rate option allows you to slow down the
  rate of Google's spider's crawl. Youll only do
  this if
• you have witnessed server issues
• due to Google's crawling.

10
Change of Address

• You decide to migrate your entire site to a new
  domain, this is where you let Google know.
• Once you've set up your new site, permanently
  redirected the content from your old site to your
  new using a 301 redirect, added and verified your
  new site on GWT, then you come to this option and
  inform Google of the move.

11
Google Analytics Property

• If you'd like to be able to see your GWT data in
  Google Analytics (GA), you can use this tool to
  associate a site with a GA account.
• Simply select any currently linked GA account to
  associate it with this site. If you don't have a
  GA account, you have the option to create one
  here.

12
Users Site Owners

• Here you can see a list of all authorized users
  on the account, and their level of authorization.
  
• Owners have permission to access every item on
  the site.
• Users with "Full" permission can do everything
  except add users, link a GA account and inform
  Google of a change of address.
• Users with "Restricted" permission have the same
  restrictions as those with "Full" permission plus
  the following they only have viewing
  capabilities on configuration data, cannot submit
  sitemaps or request URL removals, cannot submit
  URLs, cannot submit reconsideration requests, and
  only have the capability to view
• crawl errors
• malware notifications

13
Verification Details

• This lets you see any verification issues /
  successes.
• It gives displays the list of Verification
  attempts by Google to verify the website

14
Associates

• This section allows you to associate different
  Google accounts with your GWT account.
• They can't see any data in GWT, but they can
  perform actions on behalf of your site (e.g.,
  creating an official YouTube account for the
  site, or posting to Google on behalf of the site
  through an associated account).

15
Associates

• To add an associate user, simply
• Click on the "Add a new User" button.
• Enter the email address that's associated
  with the account you're associating.
• Select the type of association you want.
• Click "Add".
• To associate a Google page, if it's the same
  account on GWT and Google, you're done. If
  you're using different accounts
• Navigate to the Google page.
• Click on the profile button on the left.
• Click "About", in the links section.
• Add a link to the site.

16
Search Appearance

• Clicking on the ? icon to the right of this menu
  option delivers a nice breakdown of the various
  elements of a search engine results page (SERP).

17
Structured Data

• Here you can see information about all structured
  data elements that Google's located on your site,
  whether they're from schema.org or older micro
  formats.

18
Data Highlighter

• The data highlighter allows you to help Google
  identify some types of structured data on the
  pages without the need for the code to actually
  be implemented.
• To use the tool, you need to login to Webmaster
  Tools, choose your site and then click
  Optimization, then Data Highlighter. It gives
  you the option to tag a single page or multiple
  pages, verify the tags, and then publish it to
  Google.

19
HTML Improvements

• Here is where GWT will inform you of issues with
  your title and description tags. As titles and
  descriptions should be unique for each page and
  should be within certain character length ranges.
• Clicking through on any of these errors will give
  you a more descriptive overview of the error and
  will also give you a list of pages where the
  error was detected.

20
Site links

• Whenever Google determines that your site is an
  authority for a particular keyword they'll show a
  collection of links below the main link, pointing
  to what they believe to be the most important
  links on that page.
• While you can't specify the actual pages that you
  want to display in the site links, you can
  specify which pages you want removed.

21
Search Traffic

• Search Queries Here you can get an overview of
  the top keywords that returned a page from your
  site in the search results.
• Data shown here is collected in a slightly
  different way from your analytics platform,
  including GA, so don't expect the number to
  exactly.

22
Search Traffic

• The Search Queries section is broken down into
  five main indicators
• Query Query gives you details on what keywords
  your site is currently ranked for. It's important
  to remember that "rank for" means showing up in
  the SERPs not necessarily actively attracting
  traffic
• Impressions If you've ever wondered how many
  people are seeing your website for a specific
  keyword search, this will tell you.
• Clicks Of the people who are seeing your site,
  how many are clicking? This information lets you
  know how many searchers seeing your site are
  taking action and clicking on your search result.
• CTR Your CTR, or click-through rate, is the
  percentage of people that are clicking on your
  site in the search results.
• Average Position This metric tells you where
  your site typically ranks for each keyword.

23
Links to Your Site

• This section identifies the domains that link to
  you the most, along with your most linked to
  content. While you most likely won't see every
  link that Google's found for your site.

24
Internal Links

• Here you can see the top pages on your site
  sorted by the number of internal links to those
  pages.
• Any pages that show 0 internal links have been
  orphaned and should either be linked to from
  somewhere on your site, or redirected to an
  appropriate page.

25
Google Index

• The Index Status allows you to track the status
  of your site within the Google index. How many
  pages are they showing as being indexed? Are
  there any worrying trends? Have you accidentally
  blocked large sections of your site from
  Googlebot? This is a great place to get the
  answers to those questions and more.

26
Content Keywords

• This section displays the most common keywords
  found by the Google crawler as it navigated your
  site. One thing to keep an eye on here is if you
  see unexpected, unrelated keywords
• showing up, that's usually an indication
• that your site may have been hacked
• and hidden keywords have been
• injected into your pages.

27
Remove URLs

• If you want to remove a page from your website,
  The first step is to either remove the page
  itself or 301 it elsewhere so that it can't be
  crawled and indexed.
• Enter the URL that you want to remove, click
  continue, then select whether you want it removed
  from the search results and the cache, just from
  the cache or if you want an entire directory
  removed. Clicking Submit Request adds it to the
  removal queue. Typically this request will be
  processed in 2-12 hours.

28
Crawl

• Crawl Errors - Here's where you find out about
  the errors that Google has detected when crawling
  your site over the past 90 days.
• GWT shows you the number of errors, lists the
  pages and shows a graph of your count over time
  for that particular error so you can see whether
  it's been a gradual change or a more sudden
  occurrence.

29
Crawl Stats

• The crawl stats section gives you an idea of how
  fast the crawlers are able to read pages on your
  site.
• Spikes are to be expected here, but is you see a
  sustained drop in pages crawled, or a sustained
  spike in time spent downloading a page, or in the
  size of a page, then that's an indication that
  you should take a look and see what's changed on
  your site.

30
Fetch as Google

• Here is where you can basically view your pages
  as Google sees them. They'll return the HTTP
  response, the date and time, and the HTML code.
• This is a great way of verifying that the Google
  crawler sees the page as you expect it to and
  that there are no externally injected hidden
  links on the page.
• You are allowed 500 fetches / submissions a week,
  and 10 linked page submissions per week
  (submitting a page and all pages linked from it
  at the same time).

31
Blocked URLs

• This section is the place to test out your
  current robots.txt against any pages on your site
  to verify whether they can be crawled or not. You
  can also test out modifications to your
  robots.txt to see whether they'd work as you
  anticipate against various pages on your site.

32
Sitemaps

• This section is the place to test out your
  current robots.txt against any pages on your site
  to verify whether they can be crawled or not. You
  can also test out modifications to your
  robots.txt to see whether they'd work as you
  anticipate against various pages on your site.

33
URL Parameters

• What it does is that it allows you to specify URL
  query string parameters that shouldn't be
  considered when examining URLs on the site to
  determine unique URLs.
• For example, if you had a tracking parameter that
  you use for a particular campaign, then the page
  is obviously the exact same page as when it's
  reached without the tracking parameter. Entering
  the tracking parameter in here tells Google that
  they should ignore the tracking parameter when
  looking at the URL.

34
Malware

• If Google has detected any malware on your site,
  this is where they'll list it out (it will also
  appear in the messages section). If you see a
  page here you'll want to get it fixed as soon as
  possible and click on the "Request a Review"
  button that will be displayed here.

35
Additional Tools

• This section contains links to tools that are
  outside of GWT, but are of interest to
  webmasters, such as the Structured Data Testing
  tool, which enables webmasters to test their
  schema implementations, the Structured Data
  Markup Helper, and others.

36
Labs

• The labs section contains functionality that's in
  testing mode.
• Author Stats With the big push to tie up
  bylines to Google accounts, this tool allows you
  to see data for pages which you are the author
  for, so you'd need to be logged into an account
  in GWT that you've previously set up as an
  author.

37
Custom Search

• This allows you to set up Google customized
  search for your own site.
• Create a custom search engine that searches only
  your own site.
• Put a search box anywhere on your site.
• Customize the look and feel of the search results
  pages.

38
Instant Previews

• This tool allows you to see how your site looks
  using Google's Instant Preview feature (the view
  of your site that can be seen in the search
  results when you mouse over the double arrows
  that show up next to a result).
• However, Google removed Instant Previews in
  April, so this feature isn't of any value to
  webmasters.

39
Site Performance

• This section of Labs has been shut down and links
  off to alternative resources.

40
Thank You!