The advantages of using Google's webmaster tools

Why use google's webmaster tools

Using Google's webmaster tools has its advantages.   For one, when signed in you'll be able to see the top search queries and top clicked queries for your pages in Google's index. 

Top search queries

The top search queries will show you the top 20 queries in which your site appeared, and the percentage of the top 20 queries represented by each search.  For example, you may see that your average ranking for the query "seo tips" over the past week is #7, with that query comprising 8% of your top 20 queries.  You can adjust the time frame to display statistics by past months as well. 

Top clicked queries

The top clicked queries will show you the top 20 queries from which users reached your site, and the percentage of the top 20 queries represented by each click. For example, you may see that 10% of your clicks come from users searching for "seo tips," landing on your "seo-tips" page, which on average had position #7 in the rankings.  Using this data together with that reaped from Google's Analytics will give you a powerful edge in your search campaign. 

What Googlebot sees

Google's Webmaster tools also show you how Googlebot sees your site.  You'll get a table of external links to your site along with their anchor text (link text). This information provides good insight into how your site is seen by others. As described in SEO 101, your anchor text should be reflective of your page's keyphrase, or identity.  If you see anchor texts like "click here" or "check this out" you may want to work with the owner of those sites to have the anchor text updated to something more descriptive, and reflective of your page's keyphrase.

Crawl Stats

Google's crawl stats give you a rough indication of the overall PageRank of your pages.  Use our PageRank calculator to find out the PageRank of individual pages, and read our article on how PageRank is calculated for more insight on Google's PageRank algorithm.

Index Stats

Google's index stats provide links to search keys (variables you can use in Google's search tool to retrieve specific types of data) that show you:

• Indexed pages in your site
• Pages that link to your site's front page
• The current cache of your site
• Information Google has about your site
• Pages that are similar to your site

Subscriber Stats, Links and More

The subscriber stats page will show you how many users have subscribed to your website feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.  Since it only lists subscribers using Google's products, it will not be an accurate indicator of your overall feed subscribers. 

The links section will show you how many external and internal links your pages are getting.  The more quality external links, the more popular your page will be.  Use this table to see which page has the most links, and make sure that these pages' URL's don't change (read our article on search engine friendly redirects to find out how to move them if you need to).  If you change the URL's without notifying Google, the page will lost its popularity as now the sites linking to your page will be linking to a non-existing page. 

Use the internal links statistics to see how many of your own pages are linking to your popular pages.  You don't want to overlink to your own pages - there should be a healthy balance of external and internal links.  In general, it's not a bad idea to have more external links than internal links to any one page.  Although if you're just starting out and the number of links is less than 10 this isn't such an issue.

The sitemaps statistics will give you a quick indicator of the percentage of your URLs that are in Google's index.  It will list the total number of URLs in your sitemap followed by the number in Google's index.  You'll almost never have them all indexed, but if you have 85% or higher you're doing good

More webmaster tools

The final section of your Google Webmaster tools dashboard will give you access to various tools that we'll go into more detail on shortly.  For now though, you'll want to use analyze robots.txt to make sure your pages aren't being blocked from being indexed.  More on robots.txt in another article.

Next up: finding and choosing the right keywords

Now that you're familiar with how to optimize your website code and get it ready to have it indexed by search engines, it's time to start researching keywords and finding out what people are searching for in your industry.  Check out our article on finding the right keywords for your web pages.