Google Webmasters are the caretakers of websites and look after their wellness and well-being by implementing Google’s best practices guidelines. They look after the website’s health to ensure its satisfactory performance by meeting the optimization goal of driving more traffic to the website. Webmasters can judge the web site’s performance by analyzing data from various metrics like traffic volume, lead generation, and conversion rates that help to improve SEO strategies for better results. For judging the health of websites that involve quite some technicalities, webmasters use Google webmaster tools to gather insights about what is working and what does not. The tools help analyze the technical aspects of websites like Metadata, page errors, the keywords that Google pairs with your site, and much more. Familiarity with the tools helps to stay in better control of your website and devise better strategies for improving website performance.
The various functions of Google webmaster tools
Improving website health is the overall function of the webmaster tools Google. Besides helping to improve the health of websites, the tools perform many other functions that do not always catch the eye. The tools do a lot more in controlling various aspects of websites by establishing a communication channel between webmasters and Google. The tools help gather information about how Google sees your website, which allows making corrections for improving Google’s perception of the website. The tools help any Google webmaster to compile a list of links, external and internal, check the keywords used by searchers to reach the site, adjust the crawl rate related to indexing of websites and even monitor the click-through rate for every keyword on the site besides viewing the statistics of the website and many more.
Defining the general practices
Webmasters must adhere to the Google webmaster guidelines, like their Bible when using the tools. The guidelines include the best practices that websites must follow to appear in the search results. These are the SEO rules or how to implement SEO by following the procedures suggested by Google. The guidelines define the quality of websites as expected by Google, and not following them can adversely impact SEO. For example, violating the guidelines could prevent Google from crawling the website, which means that Google does not index the website hence omitted from the purview of the search process. Besides general guidelines, there are content-specific guidelines and quality guidelines.
Tools for daily use
To start using Google webmaster tools, you must verify your website ownership and have the Google code to access your account. Clicking on any of the headings will open the section. You can access all areas covered by the tools like search queries. It is then up to the webmasters to decide how, why, and which tools to use. It is up to them.
Search Queries
In this section, you will find the keywords used by visitors to reach your website. The exercise helps to augment your keyword research by understanding what is trending. By scrutinizing the list and matching it with the keywords used in the website, you can identify the gaps and possible improvements to make the keywords more effective. It can help to discover some powerful keywords that escaped the net of your keyword research, and you can include them for optimization. By looking at the number of impressions and clicks, you can gauge the Click-through rate (CTR) for any particular keyword. Higher CTR means higher keyword relevance, and you know where to direct your efforts.
Links
In the Links to Your Site section, you will find the backlinks (external and internal) and their source and the pages it links to. The list of links helps to identify harmful links. You can disavow these links to prevent them from adversely affecting the website performance.
Crawl errors
This section of the Google webmaster tools points to the difficulties the crawl bots face while crawling your website. From the report, you will know about the missing pages, inaccessible pages, server errors, and all other problems encountered by the bots during crawling.
You can ensure that the website has better chances of appearing in the search results by taking corrective action.
