In the modern world, you need a website; and if you have a website, you need to make sure that it is optimised and prepped for the search engines to find it and rank it favourably. In fact, if you are serious about seeing your website rank well, then you have probably already heard the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO).

In today’s blog, we are going to talk about one of the tools that will help you in your future optimisation of your website. Google Webmaster’s Tool is a great way to upload sitemaps for Google to crawl, analyse backlinks to your site; check internal links, identify best ranking keywords; stop certain pages from being crawled and to determine any errors on your site (such as duplicate titles, meta descriptions). Here we will give you a brief overview of Google Webmaster’s Tools

Site Messages
Just like an email system, this is will Google will contact you to notify you of possible errors for your site, for instance if GoogleBot cannot access your site, they will send you an email to let you know. 

Structured Data
This is a great feature for websites who have information that would be handy for the searcher – for instance, if you are a holiday resort and want to show your high customer ratings. Or if you are a restaurant and you might like to show a snippet with the average price of your meals. Maybe you’re holding an event and like it to come up in the search. With this functionality – you can set up your site, so that Google can display the relevant information.

Search Queries
As the name suggests, this section of Google Webmaster tools identifies the queries made to find pages on your website – and what sort of traffic it’s generating. This is a great tool, as you can see backlinks to your site and your internal linking system, plus you are able to identify search queries that are benefiting your business.

Google Index
For your site to rank well, Google needs to be able to find that page. The Google Index shows you how many of your pages have been indexed by Google, what keywords are most prevalent on your site and (now this is a handy tool), you can delete old pages that no longer exist or that are lost from being indexed by Google; a great way to clean up your site – if you are unable to do it yourself first.

Crawl
If you want your website’s pages to show on Google, then the Google bots need to be able to ‘crawl’ your site. This functionality will brief you on crawl errors (not found pages or server errors) so that you can go back and fix them. You will also see how often Google is crawling your site (the more the merrier). You are also able to add site maps, which is a really important aspect for your SEO (another blog – watch this space) and you can also block certain pages from being crawled by Google – ones that you don’t want coming up in the search results – ie member log-ins and so forth.

Malware
Google will notify you in this area if your website has been affected by malicious software. You will then have to clean up your site and then request that Google conduct a malware review.

If you are serious about getting your website to rank well, then it is important that you utilise Google Webmaster Tools. Not only will it give you incredible insight into how your site is performing, but it is also a free application.

Media Messages uses Google Webmaster Tools on a daily basis that is how important our SEO is to our telephone music and messaging on hold business. Even though we specialise  in the production of high quality, professional audio productions, we also have to ensure we maintain a good online presence.