Google Webmaster is one of the web services Google offers for nothing. It is the most powerful toolset which Google adheres to communicate with its webmasters and vice versa. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. Basically, it offers vital SEO awareness that come directly from Google itself as Google sees websites from a search engine’s perspective and I think this reason is good enough reason to start using the Google Webmaster tools to overview websites, make changes according to it and we can blindly rely on Google because there is no doubt that it is completely trustworthy.
If you will use Google Webmaster Tools along with Google Analytics then you will get even better results. You can access your Google Webmaster Tools data directly from Google Analytics. Some people often get confused between Google Analytics and Google Webmaster. To clear this confusion, I want to tell you that Google Analytics shows us the analysis on website’s visitors and its traffic whereas, Google Webmaster tools show us how Google sees our website as a search engine and so that can adjust them accordingly.
Google Webmaster helps us to identify various issues with our site. For example-
- The Links to Your Site section of Google Webmaster tells you where your backlinks (internal and external) come from as well as the pages they are linking to. Links from bad sites can harm your ranking so you can disallow such links with the help of this Links to Your Site section.
- Google Webmaster tools can let webmasters know if their website has been infected with malware. Cybercriminals use malware, which actually means malicious software, to get unauthorized access to computers, steal confidential data and even hijack computers. Malware is much like a virus which transmits from one human body to another. Here, in the case of a computer, if your website is infected with malware, it has the ability to install malicious software on your visitor’s website and attack other computers associated with it. So, if your website has malware in it then you need to clean it first before doing anything else.
- The Search Queries section shows the list of keywords that users typed in the search box to land on your site. You can check if this list has all the keywords you are already optimizing for or not and if it has then you are on the right track. This list contains good keywords you were not aware of. Just start optimizing for all the keywords of the Search Queries section list. Keep an eye on the CTR (click-through rate) of these keywords also. Higher CTR means the keyword is relevant and you can invest your time and energy to optimize it and don’t touch those keywords which have low CTR.
- The Keywords section also shows keywords but these are those keywords which Google has found on your site. These are those keywords which you are not optimizing for but Google is searching for. Start optimizing for them too.
- In the Crawl Errors section, you will see all those errors which Google bots have found on your site. It will show errors like inaccessible pages, missing pages, server errors, and all sorts of problems that prevented Google bots from crawling your site.
- In the Sitemaps section, you can see the sitemaps that Google has found. This sitemap will have all the URLs of your site in them. If the sitemap that Google has found is different from your expected sitemap then you can add a new sitemap for Google to use.
Very nominal people knows that Google Webmaster is no longer called Google Webmaster. The name of Google Webmaster has been changed since 20th May 2015. Now, it is known Google Search Console. But, the new name has not changed the importance it has for webmasters. It is as popular and useful as it was. In fact, most of the people refer it with its earlier name and that is Google Webmaster. Start using Google Webmaster as soon as possible because it is really an optimal instrument for SEO as it can give you a lot of important analysis of your website from search engine’s perspective as a reality check just at a single glance.