3 valuable tips to know about Google Webmaster Tools –

So exactly how will Google Webmaster Tools help me?

First, let’s compare the two: Google Analytics, provides us traffic data reports about visitors’ information like traffic source, bounce rate, and page view time. Google Webmaster on the other hand, provides us with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility from Google such as crawling, indexing and search traffic.

Recently, Google has made it possible for you to combine (or associate) each – Webmaster with Analytics. In this article, I introduce three valuable tips for using Google Webmaster Tools.

Tip #1: Associate your Google Webmaster with your Google Analytics –

After you login to your Google Webmaster home page, click Manage site dropdown (see image below) on the right side, and then click Google Analytics property.

It goes to this page (below); select the web property you want to associate with the site, and click save.

After you associate a Google Webmaster with Google Analytics, you will able to see Webmaster Data in Google Analytics reports. You will also be able to access Google Analytics reports in Webmaster. One Google Webmaster can only be associated with one Google Analytics. Any new association will replace the previous association.

Tip #2: Submit a sitemap to Google –

Instead of waiting for Google to pull a sitemap from your website, we can push a sitemap to Google. Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site Google might not have discovered, and help Google to understand your website structure.

Generate a text file with name sitemap.xml.

Sitemap sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.whitespace.on.ca/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.whitespace.on.ca/Blog/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.whitespace.on.ca/company/who-we-are</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.whitespace.on.ca/services/what-we-do</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.whitespace.on.ca/work/portfolio-01</loc>
</url>
</urlset>

Upload it into the domain root folder of your site (http://www.whitespace.on.ca/).

Go to Google Webmaster, under site configuration->sitemap, submit a sitemap

Tip #3: Fetch your website as Googlebot –

The Fetch as Googlebot tool allows us to see a page as Googlebot sees it.

Go to Google Webmaster, under Diagnostics -> Fetch as Googlebot, fetch the home page or any other page.

Information returned by the tool includes:

• The HTTP response returned by your server
• The date and time of your crawl request
• HTML code
• The first 100KB of visible (indexable) text on a page.

A number of crawl errors will prevent Google viewing your website correctly.  

For example, the home page for example.com is redirected to a subfolder, example.com/main or other file example.com/index.php. If you fetch as Googlebot example.com it will return empty html code and text. That means Google could not see your website.  To fix this error, you can type the actual URL to fetch, and click submit to index, then let Google use this URL as a starting point in indexing your site content.

We should fetch website pages often, especially after we make the website live or additional changes, and make sure our website is seen by Google as expected.