Google’s Webmaster Tools are a valuable resource in determining how your site appears to Google, and to search engines in general. The tools are quite easy to use and do not require any technical skill. However, you must be verified as the owner of the site before Google will allow access and for this you will need to place some Google verification code (provided by Google) either on your pages or on the public folder of your site. There is no charge for using these tools.

You can sign up and access the tools at www.google.com/webmasters/ .

Once verified, there is a great deal you can do here. Here’s a walk through the main points:

Site Configuration

1. You can submit a Sitemap. A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your site and the URL for them. They are useful when Google is crawling the site in helping it navigate pages on your site. If you know your site has more pages than Google has crawled, then a sitemap may rectify the situation. If all of your products or services are not indexed, then it is much more difficult for the customer to find them!

2. You can specifiy content/pages that you do not want Google to crawl by adding a robots.txt file. This is a text file which can be placed in the root directory of your website and can specify pages (URLs) not to be crawled. Search engines may also be specified. (‘Googlebot’ is the Google crawler).

Tip: Many websites have a ‘Privacy Policy’ page, which is linked to from all pages if it is in the footer. Because of the interlinking on the site, this page may be returned in search results, but is rarely what anyone is searching for. It might be more useful to exclude this page from the search engines, using the robots.txt file, so that the relevant pages are better optimised.

3. Google may have already generated Sitelinks for your website and display them in search results. These are internal links on your site. You have the option of removing these if you feel they are not correct or useful.

4. The geographic target of your site can be specified. For example, if your target audience is in Ireland, you can specify that. You won’t get far trying to sell to UK searchers if Google thinks your business is Irish oriented.

5. You can choose which URL Google will use to display search results from your site ie. the www.domainname.ie version or domainname.ie. This is important in not diluting the page rank of your site as search engines may see 2 sites instead of 1.

Your Site on the Web

1. Google will show you the searches for which it has returned your site, or impressions, and you can see how many searchers have clicked through to your site.  If you do not have many click throughs then it is an indicator that the results returned are not attracting visitors and your website is not performing effectively. Either the results displayed are not what the searcher is looking for, or the title tag does not reflect the page or the description tag is not well-optimised.

However, much greater information on traffic to your site is available using Google Analytics.

2. Links to your site (in-bound links) are shown. Doing a ‘link:www.yourdomain.ie’ search in Google will show some links, but Google does not make all of your in-bound links publicly available. The downside of this is that you will not be able to see all of your competitors links. Seeing where competitors have links from can be useful in trying to increase your own in-bound links. As in-bound links are one of the biggest factors in page rank, it is very useful to see that work on in-bound links is paying off and the links are known to Google.

3. The Keywords that Google finds on your site are shown and rated. If the Keywords do not reflect what you expect then you have some work to do with the content and meta data of your site.

Diagnostics

1. If Google detects any malware on your site, this will be shown. This will deter Google from crawling your site and should be monitored.

2. Crawl errors are shown and should be fixed, these might be broken links or problems with code.

3. Google shows stats on how often it’s crawling your site and how many pages.

4. There may also be some useful HTML suggestions relating to the Title and Description tags or if there is some content which Google is not able to index.

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