Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides a wealth of information directly from Google. Once you have verified a site with Google, they’ll give you access to all sorts of information.
Here are just a few features of Google Webmaster Tools:
1. Errors
Google Webmaster Tools will show all sorts of errors with a site. Not only does it show broken links on the site, but also links that are driving traffic to the site for which there is no valid page. Google even tells you pages it knows about but has been restricted from crawling. That’s good to know incase someone accidently blocks to much.
Google Webmaster Tools Error Report
2. Set Site Defaults
Tell Google to show your page with the www or without, set a geographic target and select if you want the images show up in Google’s enhanced image search; aka Google Image Labeler.
Google Webmaster Tools Site Defaults
3. Analyze Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
Google will provide a list of URLs that have duplicate title tags or duplicate meta descriptions as well as if there are pages with to short, or to long, meta descriptions or titles.
Google Webmaster Tools Analyzing Meta Data
4. Top Search Queries
Ever wondered what people search for that your show up for? Outside of the obvious of course. This type of information is available in Google Webmaster Tools. It shows what a site is showing up for and what people are clicking though on along with your ranking. It can even be filtered by type of search (web, image, mobile) and by country.
Google Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries
5. Manage Sitelinks
If a site is lucky enough to get an additional block of links under their listing in Google, these can be managed in Google Webmaster Tools. You can’t tell Google what pages to add, but you can tell Google not to show a sitelink it has created.
Google Sitelinks
6. Enhance 404 Error Pages
Google can provide a bit of JavaScript that can be embed on a 404 error page so that when it loads, Google will try to guess what the user was looking for based on what Google has indexed. It also comes with a handy Google site search box.
Google Webmaster Tools Enhanced 404 Error Pages
These are just a few of the features of Google Webmaster Tools. Google continues to add additional features and functionality and we can only hope other search engines follow suit.
Great article. We just implemented these for Referral Key!
best,
Chris O.
Referral Key
“Your Trusted Referral Network”
I love the top search queries info, often find my sites appearing for such random searches.
would like your help in SEO with google. please send email to the above email. thanks
Hello Vincent, and email has been sent. Thank you
I don’t mean to sound obnoxious, but do you know the difference between “to” and “too”??
Great article nonetheless
Yes, I know the difference. However, I did run it though Word’s grammar check and it didn’t catch any. Odd.
Ryvius, to be too critical about typos is two times as silly as making them in the first place. 🙂
Sorry, once or twice can be called a typo, but when it’s 10 times, it’s just bad spelling and bad grammar to me… Maybe I’m being critical here, but it’s only to help him to be more careful next time.
If I made so many mistakes, I would want someone to tell me. It just looks more professional when everything’s spelled correctly. I write in a blog as well, and I always try to double check when I post something, mainly out of respect for the readers. And English is not even my mother tongue…
Sorry if I sound too harsh
Great tips! Some spelling mistakes but I know that sometimes the fingers are not as fast as the brain or in fact can sometimes click two keys at once or even not often enough.
Anyway even spell checkers cannot distinguish between to or too or know or no and a few more besides, still that’s life….
Great article. Thanks for sharing. I love articles that are informative and straight to the point such as this one.
Regards,
Karl
thanks for the tips..!
can u give another trick how to best way to improve page rank..!
thanks
Improve page rank by working on getting good inbound links.
Great info! My favorite part of webmaster tools is definitely the top search query tool. It is nice to see from Google’s standpoint where I am ranked so I can strategize my marketing efforts.
Errors are the ones I always seem to miss and not maintain properly. I know its a major issue to correct and need to do more often!
Cleaning up the errors though can benefit usability and visibility.
Great article. Nice having all these tools and the information explained.
Thanks for sharing this great information.
Google webmaster has Tools area where you can analyze your robots.txt file and run some tests to ensure the robots file isn’t blocking any good content.There is also a Remove URL from Google area in case Google got a hold of a page they shouldn’t have.
Hope the information is useful.
Seems all pretty straight, i didn’t realise you could do point 3.) Analyze Meta Descriptions and Title Tags.. very helpful, cheers
I agree with the tips they are quite useful and sometimes webmaster ignore such things thinking they are don’t mean anything. But in reality they are useful. Google’s everything is useful 🙂
It can also see duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description.
Thomas, thank you. This is a really good list. I just began using Google Webmaster Tools. The Top Search Queries is a great tool. I just wish that updates were rendered quicker, but I guess it can’t update any faster than the bots crawl.
Thanks for the explanations. I’m gonna use some to test and improve my site. I’ve come across Google webmaster tools, but I’ve not really put more attention to them until now.
Thanks for the definitions and insights. Just another example of the great information yu pass on regularly.
Thanks for the tips, additional will be very useful if we can discuss more in details about the most important of them.
Thanks – good article. Nice having all these tools and the information explained.