Complete Guide for Google webmaster tools - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Complete Guide for Google webmaster tools

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A Complete Guide to Google Webmaster Tools, with all the new features in GWT. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Complete Guide for Google webmaster tools


1
SEO Guide for Google Webmaster Tools
2
Contents
  • Introduction Google Webmaster Tools
  • Verification
  • Site Dashboard
  • Site Messages
  • Site Settings
  • Search Appearance
  • Search Traffic
  • Google Index
  • Crawl
  • Malware
  • Additional Tools
  • Labs

3
Intro Google Webmaster Tool
  • Google's Webmaster Tools are essential for any
    strong SEO effort.
  • It helps you see your website as Google sees it.
  • The toolset gives you insights into what pages
    have been indexed on your site, what links are
    pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and
    much more.
  • A site that's active in Webmaster Tools has a
    better shot at being fully indexed and ranking
    well.

4
Verification
  • Before you can access any data on your site, you
    have to prove that you're an authorized
    representative of the site. This is done through
    a process of verification.
  • There are five main methods of verification
    currently in place for GWT.
  • \

5
Verification Methods
  • The HTML file upload. Google provides you with a
    blank, specially named file that you just have to
    drop in the root directory of your site.
  • HTML tag. Clicking on this option will provide
    you with a metatag that you can insert into the
    head of your home page.
  • Domain Name Provider. Select your Domain Name
    provider from the drop down list and Google will
    give you a step by step guide for verification
    along with a unique security token for you to
    use.
  • Google Analytics. If the Google account you're
    using for GWT is the same account as for GA, is
    an admin on the GA account, and you're using the
    asynchronous tracking code, then you can verify
    the site this way.
  • Google Tag Manager. This option allows you to use
    the Google Tag Manager to verify your site.

6
Site Dashboard
  • Now that you're verified, you can log in and
    start to examine the data for your site.
  • The first screen you'll see is the dashboard.
    This gives you a quick view into some of the more
    pertinent information for your site, along with
    any new messages from Google.

7
Site Messages
  • When Google wants to communicate with a
    webmaster, this is the place they'll do so.
  • There may be messages that inform you that you
    have pages infected with malware, unable to
    access the website, they've detected a large
    number of pages on your site, which may be an
    indication of other problems.
  • Not all messages are bad. Sometimes we can get
    congratulate msg that we have an increase in
    traffic to one or more of your pages.

8
Settings
  • Clicking on the gear icon in the top right gives
    you access to the tools that formerly resided in
    the Configuration menu item.

9
Site Settings
  • Here you can tell Google some things about your
    site if you're not able to tell them in other
    ways.
  • If you have a .com site, hosted in India, but
    it's targeted to the US, there aren't too many
    signals to the search engines that that's your
    intention. In this tab you can set your
    geographic target to the UK, which informs Google
    of your intentions for this site.
  • You can also set your preferred domain whether
    you want the site to show up in the search
    results with the www or without the www.
  • The crawl rate option allows you to slow down the
    rate of Google's spider's crawl. Youll only do
    this if
  • you have witnessed server issues
  • due to Google's crawling.

10
Change of Address
  • You decide to migrate your entire site to a new
    domain, this is where you let Google know.
  • Once you've set up your new site, permanently
    redirected the content from your old site to your
    new using a 301 redirect, added and verified your
    new site on GWT, then you come to this option and
    inform Google of the move.

11
Google Analytics Property
  • If you'd like to be able to see your GWT data in
    Google Analytics (GA), you can use this tool to
    associate a site with a GA account.
  • Simply select any currently linked GA account to
    associate it with this site. If you don't have a
    GA account, you have the option to create one
    here.

12
Users Site Owners
  • Here you can see a list of all authorized users
    on the account, and their level of authorization.
  • Owners have permission to access every item on
    the site.
  • Users with "Full" permission can do everything
    except add users, link a GA account and inform
    Google of a change of address.
  • Users with "Restricted" permission have the same
    restrictions as those with "Full" permission plus
    the following they only have viewing
    capabilities on configuration data, cannot submit
    sitemaps or request URL removals, cannot submit
    URLs, cannot submit reconsideration requests, and
    only have the capability to view
  • crawl errors
  • malware notifications

13
Verification Details
  • This lets you see any verification issues /
    successes.
  • It gives displays the list of Verification
    attempts by Google to verify the website

14
Associates
  • This section allows you to associate different
    Google accounts with your GWT account.
  • They can't see any data in GWT, but they can
    perform actions on behalf of your site (e.g.,
    creating an official YouTube account for the
    site, or posting to Google on behalf of the site
    through an associated account).

15
Associates
  • To add an associate user, simply
  • Click on the "Add a new User" button.
  • Enter the email address that's associated
    with the account you're associating.
  • Select the type of association you want.
  • Click "Add".
  • To associate a Google page, if it's the same
    account on GWT and Google, you're done. If
    you're using different accounts
  • Navigate to the Google page.
  • Click on the profile button on the left.
  • Click "About", in the links section.
  • Add a link to the site.

16
Search Appearance
  • Clicking on the ? icon to the right of this menu
    option delivers a nice breakdown of the various
    elements of a search engine results page (SERP).

17
Structured Data
  • Here you can see information about all structured
    data elements that Google's located on your site,
    whether they're from schema.org or older micro
    formats.

18
Data Highlighter
  • The data highlighter allows you to help Google
    identify some types of structured data on the
    pages without the need for the code to actually
    be implemented.
  • To use the tool, you need to login to Webmaster
    Tools, choose your site and then click
    Optimization, then Data Highlighter. It gives
    you the option to tag a single page or multiple
    pages, verify the tags, and then publish it to
    Google.

19
HTML Improvements
  • Here is where GWT will inform you of issues with
    your title and description tags. As titles and
    descriptions should be unique for each page and
    should be within certain character length ranges.
  • Clicking through on any of these errors will give
    you a more descriptive overview of the error and
    will also give you a list of pages where the
    error was detected.

20
Site links
  • Whenever Google determines that your site is an
    authority for a particular keyword they'll show a
    collection of links below the main link, pointing
    to what they believe to be the most important
    links on that page.
  • While you can't specify the actual pages that you
    want to display in the site links, you can
    specify which pages you want removed.

21
Search Traffic
  • Search Queries Here you can get an overview of
    the top keywords that returned a page from your
    site in the search results.
  • Data shown here is collected in a slightly
    different way from your analytics platform,
    including GA, so don't expect the number to
    exactly.

22
Search Traffic
  • The Search Queries section is broken down into
    five main indicators
  • Query Query gives you details on what keywords
    your site is currently ranked for. It's important
    to remember that "rank for" means showing up in
    the SERPs not necessarily actively attracting
    traffic
  • Impressions If you've ever wondered how many
    people are seeing your website for a specific
    keyword search, this will tell you.
  • Clicks Of the people who are seeing your site,
    how many are clicking? This information lets you
    know how many searchers seeing your site are
    taking action and clicking on your search result.
  • CTR Your CTR, or click-through rate, is the
    percentage of people that are clicking on your
    site in the search results.
  • Average Position This metric tells you where
    your site typically ranks for each keyword.

23
Links to Your Site
  • This section identifies the domains that link to
    you the most, along with your most linked to
    content. While you most likely won't see every
    link that Google's found for your site.

24
Internal Links
  • Here you can see the top pages on your site
    sorted by the number of internal links to those
    pages.
  • Any pages that show 0 internal links have been
    orphaned and should either be linked to from
    somewhere on your site, or redirected to an
    appropriate page.

25
Google Index
  • The Index Status allows you to track the status
    of your site within the Google index. How many
    pages are they showing as being indexed? Are
    there any worrying trends? Have you accidentally
    blocked large sections of your site from
    Googlebot? This is a great place to get the
    answers to those questions and more.

26
Content Keywords
  • This section displays the most common keywords
    found by the Google crawler as it navigated your
    site. One thing to keep an eye on here is if you
    see unexpected, unrelated keywords
  • showing up, that's usually an indication
  • that your site may have been hacked
  • and hidden keywords have been
  • injected into your pages.

27
Remove URLs
  • If you want to remove a page from your website,
    The first step is to either remove the page
    itself or 301 it elsewhere so that it can't be
    crawled and indexed.
  • Enter the URL that you want to remove, click
    continue, then select whether you want it removed
    from the search results and the cache, just from
    the cache or if you want an entire directory
    removed. Clicking Submit Request adds it to the
    removal queue. Typically this request will be
    processed in 2-12 hours.

28
Crawl
  • Crawl Errors - Here's where you find out about
    the errors that Google has detected when crawling
    your site over the past 90 days.
  • GWT shows you the number of errors, lists the
    pages and shows a graph of your count over time
    for that particular error so you can see whether
    it's been a gradual change or a more sudden
    occurrence.

29
Crawl Stats
  • The crawl stats section gives you an idea of how
    fast the crawlers are able to read pages on your
    site.
  • Spikes are to be expected here, but is you see a
    sustained drop in pages crawled, or a sustained
    spike in time spent downloading a page, or in the
    size of a page, then that's an indication that
    you should take a look and see what's changed on
    your site.

30
Fetch as Google
  • Here is where you can basically view your pages
    as Google sees them. They'll return the HTTP
    response, the date and time, and the HTML code.
  • This is a great way of verifying that the Google
    crawler sees the page as you expect it to and
    that there are no externally injected hidden
    links on the page.
  • You are allowed 500 fetches / submissions a week,
    and 10 linked page submissions per week
    (submitting a page and all pages linked from it
    at the same time).

31
Blocked URLs
  • This section is the place to test out your
    current robots.txt against any pages on your site
    to verify whether they can be crawled or not. You
    can also test out modifications to your
    robots.txt to see whether they'd work as you
    anticipate against various pages on your site.

32
Sitemaps
  • This section is the place to test out your
    current robots.txt against any pages on your site
    to verify whether they can be crawled or not. You
    can also test out modifications to your
    robots.txt to see whether they'd work as you
    anticipate against various pages on your site.

33
URL Parameters
  • What it does is that it allows you to specify URL
    query string parameters that shouldn't be
    considered when examining URLs on the site to
    determine unique URLs.
  • For example, if you had a tracking parameter that
    you use for a particular campaign, then the page
    is obviously the exact same page as when it's
    reached without the tracking parameter. Entering
    the tracking parameter in here tells Google that
    they should ignore the tracking parameter when
    looking at the URL.

34
Malware
  • If Google has detected any malware on your site,
    this is where they'll list it out (it will also
    appear in the messages section). If you see a
    page here you'll want to get it fixed as soon as
    possible and click on the "Request a Review"
    button that will be displayed here.

35
Additional Tools
  • This section contains links to tools that are
    outside of GWT, but are of interest to
    webmasters, such as the Structured Data Testing
    tool, which enables webmasters to test their
    schema implementations, the Structured Data
    Markup Helper, and others.

36
Labs
  • The labs section contains functionality that's in
    testing mode.
  • Author Stats With the big push to tie up
    bylines to Google accounts, this tool allows you
    to see data for pages which you are the author
    for, so you'd need to be logged into an account
    in GWT that you've previously set up as an
    author.

37
Custom Search
  • This allows you to set up Google customized
    search for your own site.
  • Create a custom search engine that searches only
    your own site.
  • Put a search box anywhere on your site.
  • Customize the look and feel of the search results
    pages.

38
Instant Previews
  • This tool allows you to see how your site looks
    using Google's Instant Preview feature (the view
    of your site that can be seen in the search
    results when you mouse over the double arrows
    that show up next to a result).
  • However, Google removed Instant Previews in
    April, so this feature isn't of any value to
    webmasters.

39
Site Performance
  • This section of Labs has been shut down and links
    off to alternative resources.

40
Thank You!
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