If you are interested in improving your organic SEO rankings on Google, using Google Webmaster tools is a must. This tool can provide you with valuable information regarding the health of your website on the search engines. It also provides you with information regarding any problems that might cause your website to drop in rankings.
This is a free tool from Google and anyone that are interested in marketing their business online should use it. It can also be linked directly to your Google Analytics account to give you more relevant information on how people find your website online. Here’s a couple of tips using Google Webmaster Tools.
Using Google Webmaster Tools for measurement
Be notified: This is the first thing you should activate where you can enable emails to be send to you (once a day) on any issues of your website that you should be aware of.
Website improvements: Under the search appearance you will find a section “HTML improvements” which can show you various HTML improvements that you can do on your website to optimise it better. This includes meta elements such as the meta description, and title tags.
Search: On the search traffic section you can view “Search Queries” that will track how many times your website pages are appearing on the organic search and how often people are clicking on the listing.
Links: SEO and digital marketing are still about links and this section provides you with a useful way of finding who’s linking to you and what anchor text is used.
Crawl errors: This is another useful section that tracks any errors your website is generating. It provides you with information on where the error occurred, how often it happen, and where it’s linked from so that you can track the source of the problem.
Index status: This shows you how many of the URL’s on your website are indexed.
Sitemaps: On this section you can add XML sitemaps to your Google account to make it easier for the Google bot to crawl your content. It also shows you how many pages are contained in your sitemaps and how many of them are indexed.
