Google Webmaster Tools

As I've mentioned before, Google has an array of products available for you to try out and experiment with. All of these are completely FREE of Charge, and it's well worth signing up for a Google account if you haven't already done so, to see the possibilities of how these tools can help you and your website.

One of the most important ones from an SEO point of view is Google Webmaster Tools. This cool tool "provides you with detailed reports about your pages visibility on Google". There is a ton of information in Webmaster Tools, including a comprehensive lost of pages linking to you (very important, and much better than using normal google search and "link: yoursite.com"), as well as crawl errors, robot.txt errors, internal linking erros, basically any erros that you can fix. The tool also gives you a broken url feunction, which is now very, very good. This basically gives you a list of the urls across the web where you have a link to one of your web pages, but that it broken. The list used to just tell you how many links you had broken, but now gives you a list of which websites actually feature this broken link so that you can correct this. Maybe it's a reciprical link that has incorrect html, or a blog post, article, etc. This is a fantastic tool.

Another main feature is the keyword analysis tool, which shows you which keywords have been used to find pages in your website, month by month. You can choose any date range and compare and contrast, depending on what you have been focussing on during your SEO campaign.

Another very important tool is the sitemap feature. This allows you to upload a sitemap to Google which is then verified, to help Googlebot crawl all of your pages. This is espcially good if you have a large site, but equally as important for a small site, to ensure that Google has the details of all the pages on your site.

For some users, the sheer amount of information in Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics can be daunting, so it's important to be able to interpret the data.

I offer SEO Training in Barcelona which covers such topics as Data Analysis, and how to react under different situations. Please contact me for details.