How To Use Google Webmaster Tools To Manage Your Site For Better SEO

Google Webmaster Tools is a free tool to manage your site in the result of Google search. If you add your site to it, you will learn the functioning of Google well. How it views and improves the presentation of your site in its search results. It is mandatory to use Google Webmaster Tools. Because, it ensures the accessibility of your site to Google. It adds novel data onto Google and eliminates the unwanted one from search result. Visually engaging results are created and observed by it. And it keeps your site clean by settling the spam and malware disputes. It teaches us the searching criteria of Google and how the world visualizes our site. For instance, it tells the queries that have increased our visibility in search results and traffic. It informs us either the major features of our site are eminent in search results or not. With its help, we learn about linked sites and performance of mobile sites. To ensure the progress of the site, you must be acquainted with the advanced level working of Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t know it at advanced levels, you must be aware of its basics. Otherwise, you need to hire a professional webmaster to ensure the availability of the site in the search result and its best performance. Google Webmaster Tools motivates us to decide more technically on our site. And it works with other influential tools e.g. Analytics, Google trends, and AdWords to optimize our site. It helps site administrators to resolve many issues e.g server errors, site load and security concerns. Web developers get its assistance to preclude errors regarding Structured data.
General features of Google Webmaster Tools:
Following are the main features of Google Webmaster Tools. That must be followed robustly to optimize the performance and presentation of our site.

• How to add your website in Google Webmaster Tools.
• Sorting of website in Google Webmaster Tools.
• Your website dashboard.
• Search Appearance of your website.
• Search Traffic of your website.
• Site URLs, that are indexed in Google Search Engine.
• What is crawling?

How to add your website to Webmaster Tools:

You can add almost 1,000 websites to your Webmaster’s account. You would be asked to verify your site. You have to show your ownership to proceed further. There are two methods of submission of your website to Webmaster Tools

1. Automatic Method
2. Manual Method

Automatic Method: Google Webmaster Tool is capable of detecting those websites that have been developed by using other Google products. For instance, if you have developed a website on blogger by using the same Gmail account as Webmaster. This site will automatically be detected by Webmaster Tools  to add.
Manual Method: Following are the steps that a Webmaster has to follow:

First of all login to your Gmail account. Type webmaster tools in Google search bar like this:

First of all login to your account of webmaster tools.

Open your webmaster tools account, a window opens, there will be a button “ADD A SITE” on the right side.
Click this button, a Popup box will open with a message “Enter the URL of your website to webmaster tools” within a text box. 
Enter your URL here and click continue. A new window will open with two options of verification. 1. Recommended method for verification.
2. Alternate methods for verification.
In the  first method which is recommended by webmaster tools,  we have to adopt an upload file method. Which has following options:

• Download HTML verification file to your PC
• Upload this HTML file to your root domain
• Confirm your file in the browser

• Click red button to VERIFY. After successful verification, your website’s stats will open in Webmaster Tools site dashboard. Second option is Alternate Methods of verification that has following options:

How to verify your site with meta tag:

To verify your site by the addition of meta tag. You need to go to the home page of Webmaster Tools. Meta tags are compulsory for the verification of the site. Unavailability of meta tags causes your site to be unverified. And you would have to go through a verification  process again.

How to verify your domain name:

Domain name can be verified by using domain name provider. Sign in to your domain name provider or server, for example GoDaddy.com. It will enable you to verify your site from Webmaster Tools directly. And enter a novel TXT or CNAME record. Steps to follow:

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How to verify your site with Google Analytics:

Google Analytics tracking code is very helpful for the verification of the site to which it is associated. This verification is used to verify your ownership. By this verification, another administrator of your Analytics account will be able to track your site’s data in Webmaster Tools.

How to verify your site with container snippet:

Google Tag Manager container snippet code is used to verify your ownership of the site in Webmaster Tools. You need to place snippet code just after the <body> tag of the page.

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How to manage your site settings:

First of All go to the website settings that consists of many important features that are as follows:

How to manage email notifications:

Google sends messages about different issues pertinent to your site. These messages are received on Webmaster Tools account. The most recent message is displayed on the home page of Webmaster Tools.

How to change site settings:

Google gives us the most pertinent result regarding our search queries. But this result varies geographically. If you have generic top level domain like .com, .net and .org. You need to set your geographical location in Webmaster Tools, to facilitate Google to show your site in its search result according to query. If you have country coded top level domain e.g ‘.ie’ in case of Ireland. You don’t need to mention your geographical location.

How to set preferred domain:

The preferred domain is used to index the pages of your site. You always want that your preferred domain must be used to display your site in search result. When you set your preferred domain, Google uses that information to crawl and index your site. If preferred domain is mentioned as WWW.example.com. Google will display your URLs containing WWW in its search results. If no preferred domain has been told, links with WWW or without WWW would be treated separately. Manage your preferred domain in webmaster tools and redirect another version on the preferred version.

How to change crawl rate:

During crawling crawl rate, is the speed of request of Googlebot. When you want Google to crawl your data, you need to submit your pertinent link to “Fetch as Google” in Webmaster Tools.  Google has many efficient tools to crawl your site’s pages without disturbing the bandwidth of your server. If you feel that your site is being crawled slowly. You need to change the crawl rate at root level e.g. www.example.com or http://subdomain.example.com. Always change the crawl rate in Webmaster Tools whenever you feel any problem related to Googlebot accessing. If the sites are not at root level, you can’t change their crawl rate. We can change crawl rate by two ways one is by Google and second is custom based. In the first option, Google decides what should be your website crawl rate. But if you choose 2nd option and select maximum crawl rate. It would slow your server by increasing the bandwidth of  your website.

How to Change site Address:

When you move your website to a new domain. You could utilize this “Change of Address” tool to inform Google about the new URL. Google will update your index to display the latest URL. This tool is very reliable to use because, unauthorized people can’t use it. It is used when you create a new domain and want to get an influx of visitor from the old website to the new one. You can use this tool by adding your new site in Webmaster Tools according to the procedure mentioned above. It will make your website healthy content wise and redirect your old domain to the new one with 301(permanent)redirects. Select your verified site and submit it.

How to associate your site with Google Analytics Property:

Google Analytics is very helpful in providing access to Webmaster Tools search optimization data. For this purpose, you just need to link Google Analytics web property.

How to manage and add new owner:

Owners are the authorized persons that have full access to perform different functions. They could add new users and remove already existing ones through Webmaster Tools. They can handle different functions e.g. configure settings, view all data and use all the tools that are available. By this tool, you can add more than one owner of your site with permissions, click “Add a user” button to add a new user. Enter the email account in this text area and select permission from drop down menu. If you want to give full access to the user, select full permission. And if you want to give custom access, give restricted access.

Verification Details

Use this tool if you want to add more verified owner to your website in your Webmaster Tools account.

What is a Site dashboard

Site dashboard is a window which contains the data in the form of widgets. There are four widgets that are available on this page.

• New and Important messages.
• Current status of crawl errors.
• Current status of Search Queries.
• Current status of Sitemaps.

New and Important messages  It contains messages which are from Google to the webmasters to provide the latest updates about a website. For instance, site access, server errors, user generated spam and possible outages.

How to check Crawl issue

This crawl issue contains further categories like Crawl errors, Crawl stats, Fetch as Google, Blocked URL, Sitemaps and URL parameters errors.

How to check crawl errors and URL errors

Crawl errors page contains detailed information about those URLs in your website that are not crawled by Google. And they return an HTTP error code. Webmaster Tools facilitates you to check your site errors according to crawling. These errors are the detail of pages/URLs of your site which are not successfully crawled. To view errors you have to open crawl errors page, there two types of errors will be displayed e.g. Site Errors and URL Errors. Crawl errors contain errors pertinent to your website and URLs. Site errors include DNS, Server Connectivity and Robots.txt fetch issues. And URL errors include errors relevant to the web, smart phone and feature phone.  

How to check crawl stats

Crawl Stats is another sophisticated feature of Webmaster Tools. It contains daily report of your site according to Google bot activity in last 90 days. Reports of Pages Crawled per day, Kilobytes downloaded per day and time spend in downloading a page within milliseconds. Pages Crawled per Day show us the graph of our site. It is crawled by Googlebot in three phases high, average and low. High tells us the highest peak of crawl stats and low tells us the lowest peak  of crawl stats. Kilobytes download per day will tell us the number of bytes consume daily in kilobytes. It also shows a graph in High, Average and Low Peaks. Time spends in downloading a page in milliseconds will tell us the report of a single page of our site with high, average and low peaks of the graph.

Fetch as Google

The Fetch as Google tool is an effective feature of Webmaster Tools. It enables you to view your page as Google visualizes it. Fetch as Google means to add your website to Google  to index the URLs of your website. It is quite helpful if webmaster is troubleshooting the bad performance of its page in Google search. Open Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools there will be an option or text box for URLs submission. Fetch here according to Web, Mobile XHTML/WML, Mobile CHMTL, Mobile Smartphone-New and Mobile Smartphone-deprecated.

In this image of Fetch as Google their are 495 fetches remaining and 0 URL and linked pages submissions are remaining. You can fetch 500 URLs to Google in a week and 10 “URL and linked pages” per month. It will take your submitted link as a starting point and start indexing your URLs from submitted URL. Enter URL of the required page in the text box and select web option from the drop down menu and fetch it. After successful fetching, a success status of fetch and Submit to index button will appear. When you click on the success status, the format of site appears as Google will see your site.
And when you click “Submit to index” button two options for submission will appear. Submit single “URL only” and “submit URL and linked pages.”. When you submit, a message will display URL submitted to the index.

Google Fetch and Render

Google web master tools is replete with numerous features. Now, Google has announced and added a new feature to it in the form of Google Fetch and Render. It works as Fetch as Googlebot. But its output is totally different from Fetch as Googlebot. Because it enables you to view the output in the form of code and HTML code.
This source code is easily be understood by web crawlers. But you can’t be understood it what it says. So, this Fetch as Render has been introduced to give you a visual representation of your web page. That will be provided with a list of issues pertinent to your page. Now, it has become so much easy to get an idea about the internal problems of your page.

Use Fetch and Render

Go to your Google webmaster Tools  and select your required website. Click Fetch as Google under the crawl option. Here you will be asked to enter the complete URL or a particular page URL of your site. Click Fetch and Render, it will take a few minutes and give you a status complete indicator. If resources of your entered URL are Blocked, the indicator will show “Partial Rendering.“. Otherwise, it will proceed to give you a complete status indicator. you can also select your device for which you want to visualize your output. There is a drop down which is rich devices like Desktop, Mobile, Smartphone, Mobile: XHTML/WML, Mobile: CHTML etc. Click on the status of your required path, you will be provided with the issues related to your page. And gives you the output of your entered page as it is visible to Googlebots.

How to add your Sitemap:

Sitemap is a way to tell Google about pages of your own choice and those that could not be discovered by Google. It is a cardinal feature that is provided by Webmaster Tools, that tells Google to crawl prioritized and undiscoverable URLs. Each sitemap page has the capacity to hold 50000 URLs per page. You can submit your sitemap in .xml or .xml.gz format. Open your sitemaps dashboard in your Webmaster Tools.

The dashboard contains two options and many attributes which are  “ALL content types” and” Webpages”. All content types include all types of Sitemap files according to webpage, image, video, news and mobile. This blue bar in the graph shows the report of site’s pages submitted to Google for indexing. And red bar shows the number of  indexed pages in Google search engine. You can also download your sitemap file in CSV or Google docs format. Resubmit your sitemap when you update your site. And delete it when there is no use of it.

How to get Blocked URL reports

Blocked URLs is an option that comes under the crawl feature of Webmaster Tools. It contains  those URLs that a webmaster do not want to display in search result. For this purpose we use robots.txt file. In which we allow and disallow specific pages to all types of internet bot (*) and specific bots (e.g:- Google bot). The dashboard of Blocked URLs consists of robots.txt file URL, blocked URLs, Downloaded date and status. You can also test your User-agents in this dashboard.

What are URL parameters

It is a tool which is used to facilitate Google to crawl your site in more efficient way. Crawling and indexing of site’s pages with duplicate material create trouble for Googlebots. There are more than one URLs that point to the same page. Duplicate material creates ambiguity for Google bots because same content is displayed by different session IDs and URL parameters. And Googlebots are forced to think which URL is best to display the content in the search result.  Then Google selects the best URL to present in the search result on the basis of link popularity.
This image is showing options of URL parameters dashboard in which we add parameters , edit them or delete them. One most important thing you must keep in mind change the URL parameters when you have its proper knowledge. Because, if you conduct a mistake, it will exclude you from search engine result. So leave it to Googlebot to decide about your crawling if you have no idea about URL parameters. Google Index includes indexed pages related to your website ,content keywords and Removed URLs.

How to check Index Status

Index status consists of graph which displays the status of crawled and indexed URLs by Google. Index status dashboard consists of two options:

1. Basic Interface
2. Advanced Interface

Basic Interface

Basic Interface consists of total indexed URLs. These indexed URLs will change with the span of time when pages are indexed, added and removed in a site. But it has not those URLs which are duplicate and non-canonical. Indexed URLs are mostly less than the quantity of crawled URLs.

Advanced Interface

Use this option if you want to see additional data with the basic interface. It consists of two additional features:

1. Ever crawled
2. Blocked by robots

Ever crawled

It consists of total number of URLs crawled by Google.

Blocked by robots

It consists of those URLs which are not crawled by Google. These URLs are mostly blocked by webmasters through robots.txt file.

Red line shows the number of pages ever crawled by Google. While blue line shows the number of pages total indexed. There is no golden and purple line, so, there is no issue of blocked and removed pages in indexing.

Content Keywords

Content keywords contains most occurring keywords and their variants when Google crawls your site. If you find unexpected keywords like “Viagra” in your content keywords, it means your website has been hacked.

This image is showing two columns of keywords with their variants and their significance in the pages of your website. 1st keyword has significance on your site and has 4 variants. It implies if the keyword is “post”, its variants are posts, post, posting and postage.

Remove URLs

Use this tool If you want to remove specific page from Google search. And if these are in a huge quantity, use your robots.txt file as explained above. It consists of a button “create a new removal request”. And a drop down menu which shows pending status. Enter your required link in this text box, remember this text box is quite case sensitive. Use it carefully, copy your URL that comes after ‘/’ and paste in this text field. Press “Continue” to proceed further. A drop down menu will open which will ask what type of removal do you want. Select your required option and press “submit request” button.

How to monitor Search Traffic

Search Traffic tells us about “Search Queries” and “Links to Your Site.”. Our website has also “internal links and “Manual Actions.”. This point is quite lengthy so, understand it with great care and attention. Because it will help you in Search Engine Optimization.

How to monitor Search queries

The Search Queries page in the Webmaster Tools consists of search queries. That consists of those URLs that have returned from your website. Search queries dashboard contains two main features “Top queries” and “Top pages”. And two calendars are present to set date range to get specific data of last 3 months to compare. Below these options there comes the graph of number of queries. Their impressions in the search result. And the number of clicks that these queries get from search engine. Now, go to filter drop down option click filter button, a dropdown dashboard will open to get best result.

How to check your linked sites:

To get a bulk of links that link to your site, you can use link operator for this purpose. For instance, write link:www.example.com in Google search bar, you will get the desired result. But if you want to get your links from Webmaster Tools. Click the option “Links to your Site” it will display the data of websites who are linking to you.

How to check Internal Links:

Internal links are the way to tell your search engine about the significance of your webpage. These are the pages of your website which are internally linked to internal pages of the same website. To find internal links of your website copy required URL of your site. You will get your required reports through Webmaster Tools. If a webmaster wants Google to increase its page and website ranking. He has to link its website pages together.

How to check Manual actions of site:

Google uses algorithms to evaluate and assess search quality. And it also rely on manual action to demote and remove sites that use spammy techniques. The manual action page consists of the list of spammy actions and links to curb these issues. If your site is not appearing in the search result. You need to check manual action page to resolve the problem. But if you are working according to rubrics of Webmaster Tools. You can request to review your site through manual action page. Manual actions are the penalties from Google  search engine to take action against any spam activity that Google has found in your website . If you have no spam issue, a message will display

“No manual web spam actions found.”.

Now, move to “Search appearance” it consists of four options Structured data, Data highlighter, HTML improvements and site links.

How to check Structured data of site:

If Google gets idea about the Markup on your pages. It could add new rich snippets and other features to the search result. The Structured Data page in Webmaster Tools enables Google to find such structured information on your site. It is also involved in providing information about errors in page markup. And it creates problems to display rich snippets.

How to use data highlighter:

It is a webmaster tool that tells Google about the pattern of Structured data. Its aim is to display search results in more attractive way . It consists of “Start Highlighting Button” to create set of highlighted pages. And reports of page set, data type, status, # of pages and date of last modification. It has following options for data highlighting:

1. Articles
2. Restaurant
3. Movies
4. Events
5. Products
6. TV Episodes
7. Local business
8. Software
9. Applications
10. Books.

You have to create a page set or a single page for tagging. Click button “Start Highlighting”, a bubble will open like this:Enter your URL in this text area, select your type from drop down menu as I explained above. Select from these two options and then click OK, a new dashboard opens which will quite descriptive and user friendly.

How to manage your search appearance

HTML Improvements

It consists of those issues that Google find in your site during crawling and indexing. It is recommended to check these reports daily because these are the ranking factors of your site. By using this, a webmaster can facilitate its audience and increase site’s traffic. It consists of the following options:

1. Meta description
2. Title tags
3. Non-Indexable content

Meta description contains Duplicate, Long and Short meta description. Title tags consists of Missing, Duplicate, Long, Short and Non-Informative title tags. Among all these options most occurring improvements are duplication, short meta description and duplicate title tags. If you have automatically generated content on your website, you have to create a programmatic description. That helps you and will not create any trouble in the duplication of your description.

How to manage your Sitelinks:

Sitelinks are automated links that are generated by Google and are displayed under your website in search results. Which link will be shown as a Sitelinks, it is decided by Google randomly. But if you want a specific page not to be shown in Sitelinks, you have to demote it. Only website admin and webmaster can do this through webmaster tools.If you want to demote your full website, you have to leave the upper text box empty as stated in the image above. And if you want specific link to demote, copy your required link and paste in lower text box and press DEMOTE button.

Other Resources:

Other Resources contains those options which are not a part of Google Webmaster Tools. They are out of Google Webmaster Tools but cardinal for webmasters  to check their Structured data to show search engine results etc. It consists of following options:

1. Structure data testing tool.
2. Structure data Markup helper.
3. Email markup tester.
4. Google Places.
5. Google Merchant center.
6. PageSpeed Insights.
7. Custom Search.

Labs:

It is a testing area as its name ‘Labs’ tells us. Webmasters can check  Author Stats of all the sites here. That have added in Webmaster Tools accounts and also compare their site pages. It has two options:

1. Author stats
2. Instant Previews

Author Stats:

This option is just like search queries option. The difference is, search queries are linked to our site behavior with SERP and Author Stats is linked to our Google+ account.

Instant Previews:

This option is used to compare your site’s live pages with the Google instant preview feature. Click compare button with root domain or enter specific URL to test. It may take some time and show success status like “Fetch as Google”. When you click success link , it takes you to the page where three frames are available. And it will display your page according to different platforms.

Conclusion

To conclude, I can say that Google Webmaster Tools is a free tool to keep the rank of our site high. It works efficiently to curb the issues of our site regarding searches, security and functioning. It settles the disputes prudently and robustly and keeps our site error free. With the help of this tool our site can compete all over the world. Because it provides us with a step wise guidelines and points out our flaws. It assists us in eradicating the issues that are responsible for lowering the ranking of our site. It implies, it is the best tool to keep our morale high. To get room in the list of highly ranked sites.

- See more at: http://www.howdescribe.com/2014/01/31/google-webmaster-tools-and-serp/#sthash.7jbztfyG.dpuf