SEO with Google Webmaster Tools

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Google.

They are of course the most popular search engine in the world at this time, yet I still get frustrated by some of the results I get from them, especially when I’m looking up programming terms.

Google AdWords wants too much money for some of the phrases I would like to use to send traffic to my web pages, yet since we are talking about Google, they don’t tell you how you can improve your quality score for landing pages to reduce the fees you pay.

I also find some of the things they say very arrogant.

Yet, they do some good stuff, and one of the things I’m going to talk about today is something that I haven’t seen any of the “usual suspects” promoting. Probably because there’s no money in it.

Google Webmaster Tools.

My favourite feature from this service at present is that once I have confirmed that I own a web site, which you do by uploading a file to your host or adding a meta tag to the head section of your web page, it gives me details of the keywords that I rank for on that site. It also gives me the number of impressions I am getting for the keywords I rank for in any given period, and it gives me click-through rates for organic listings.

Not only that, but the click-through rates are also presented in a tabular form, where you will see what the CTR is when your site ranks top, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th to 10th, 2nd page, or 3rd page or lower. It also tells you the number of impressions you got at that ranking level during the period, and the average position you held during that period.

Armed with this information, you can then go about optimising the relevant pages of your site for the given keyword, if it’s worthwhile to do so. You can make that decision by looking at the volume and estimating the number of clicks per unit period you would get if you optimised for that keyword.

What’s really great about this is that you can get all this information for free, without violating Google’s terms and conditions by scraping their results. It’s a good companion to Google Analytics, but it goes further.

If you want to make more money, use Google Analytics to find out what pages of your site and what keywords make you money and what the conversion rate of those pages and keywords are (and you can even do this for AdSense now), and optimise the keywords that are getting you conversions.

There’s a lot more stuff, too. You can see the external links to your site that Google knows about, and what pages they link to. You can see the anchor text that people are using to link to your site. You can see the most common keywords found on your site. You can see what your internal link structure is like. You can see how many Google subscribers there are to your feeds.

You can submit sitemaps, and find out how many of your pages are indexed. You can check your robots.txt file. If you’re moving a site, you can tell it about the change after you’ve set up your 301 redirects. You can speed up or slow down the rate at which Googlebot crawls your site content.

Google even scans for malware, and any detections will be shown in Webmaster Tools. I am told that it may even tell you how to remove the malware if your site has been hacked.

It can also tell you generally how fast your website is, and suggests ways of improving the load speed.

This is basically Google’s SEO toolkit, and perhaps that’s what they should have called it. I like it, and I thought I should tell you about it, just in case you weren’t aware of its existence.