While building a website, checking the performance of your website and the behavior of users is more important than diving into the revenue & traffic. To monitor this Google has developed an amazing tool named Google webmaster tool or Google Search Console (GSC) to analyze the overall performance of your website. This tool is free of cost. It is the only tool that allows you to communicate with Google & adjust many aspects of your website such as crawl errors, keywords, backlinks, sitemap and many more. To know more about Google Webmaster Tool in SEO, keep reading this article till the end.
Webmaster Tool is one of the most important tools for optimizing and monitoring your website. It provides you with all the website details such as pages, most viewed pages or posts, keyword ranking.
Using the Google webmaster tool won’t make your website get ranked immediately but it would help to analyze and correct the website information. In today’s online environment if you want to perform well, with the help of the Google webmaster tool your website would stay afloat amongst other website.
There are many perks of using the Google webmaster tool. Some of them are:
- It provides an insight into how your web- pages are indexed on your website and check the crawl errors like 404, soft 404, DNS error, etc.
- It provides you the links that are pointing to your website and you can de-mote site links that you don’t want.
- You can geographically target your website. If you want to target Nepal. You can set Nepal as your target.
- You can also check for the most searched keywords for your website.
In its core, the webmaster tool features are all about getting your website indexed, getting links, getting more traffic. Here are a few of the best webmaster tool features which help in improving your website ranking in the SERP. Google webmaster tool is a gem in SEO for online marketers.
Here are some of the features of Google webmaster tool-
- Checking the links:
If you don’t want a page on your website to be indexed, you can submit a request on Google webmaster tools and it will be manually removed from the index. In the link checking tools, you can see the position and placement of your backlinks (other websites linking back to yours), how strong your website link is and how your link will affect the ranking.
- Updates on crawler errors:
Google webmaster tool offers the best crawler notification and error on your website. You can see if Google is having any issue with crawling or site speed issues. It will tell you about the missing page, server error, accessible and in-accessible page. Once you resolve the issue and notify Google to re-index your pages.
- Search analytics:
This section shows the keywords which led the users to your site. You can see if there has been an increase or decrease in organic search queries with the latest update in webmaster tools. You can also see the search queries used by people to find your website. If you click on Impressions, CTR, Position more detailed data will be revealed.
*Impression – How many times your website appeared in SERP.
*CTR– Click-through-rate calculated by the no of impressions divided by the number of clicks.
*Position– It tells you where your website is ranking for a particular search query.
- Sitemaps:
It is a very useful tool to make your website crawl faster by adding a Google webmasters account and submitting a sitemap which consists of the list of web-pages that needs to be indexed. You can include a ranking system in the sitemap to let the search engine know what pages are important. Hence uploading an XML sitemap and setting it to index in webmaster tools advises Google to index your website.
- Fetch as Google:
This tool allows you to see your website from Google’s point of view. It allows you to see if there are any issues with your website that would hinder Google. If you have a new page or a page with updated content, log in to webmaster tools and enter the URL & fetch as Google to help the content get indexed. This is the easiest way to tell Google to check out your page.
- Sitelinks:
You may have seen the extra links given below any company’s website in the SERP. Those are called sitelinks. It allows users to visit the sub-page of any website directly. They are automatically generated by Google. By clicking on Search Appearance & then Sitelinks, you can have it removed if you wish to and ensure only the best & relevant site links are present.
Read also…
- What is a Search Engine and how Does it work?
- What is Indexing in SEO?
- Is Email Marketing really important for your business?
- What is Crawling in SEO?
Understanding Webmaster tools can take a little time but once you become a pro, you can become an expert in no time.
