Dipping into the Blogpond

Back in February, I wrote about Google Webmaster Tools. There have been some new services added since, so I thought it might be time to revisit this excellent resource.

Assuming you have a Google account, probably the best spot to start is Webmaster Central.

From here you find links to funky tools and applications like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Gadgets, Custom Search, Developer Tools, Google Webmaster Blog, and even a link to submit your site to Google Search (handy for when you first set up your blog).

How to set up Google Webmaster Tools for your Site or Blog

It’s a pretty quick process. Firstly you head to Google Webmaster Tools (and sign in to your Google account, if you’re not already signed in).

Next you need to add your site

You will then get a message saying that the next step is to verify your website. Click on that link and you will get a page telling you your site is not verified and presenting two ways to verify it.

One option is to upload an HTML file, the other is to add a meta tag. I found this second option to be pretty easy. I just copied the code that was presented, and pasted it in my header template, as per Google’s instructions. (To do this in WordPress, I went to Presentation / Theme Editor and edited my Header.php file).

Once you’ve pasted this code in, you can click on the “verify now” button, and assuming you’ve added the code correctly, you will now have access to the range of Webmaster Tools. Of course, you’ll have to wait a couple of days, if not a bit longer, for all the data to show up.

What’s so Good about Webmaster Tools?

I’m glad you asked . Webmaster Tools provide access to the following:

Diagnostics

This section tells you if there are errors in pages on your site. For example, I sometimes forget to put an http:// in front of hyperlinks. When you do that, the assumption is that the linked url is on your website. While you should always check links when you post them, sometimes it’s easy to forget. This is illustrated below:

The diagnostic section also shows URLs that are being excluded from being crawled, and URLs that could not be reached.

Statistics

• Top Search Queries – these are search queries that return pages from your site and your average position
• Top Search Query Clicks – search queries that directed traffic to your site and your average position
• How Googlebot sees your site – such as the anchor text people are using to link to you (e.g. some of the popular ones for here are “Meg”, “Dipping into the Blogpond” and “Blogpond”), popular terms in your site’s content, crawl statistics and links to “advanced” Google searches like “site:”, “link:” and “info:”
• NEW Subscriber Stats – which shows how many readers have subscribed to your feed in igoogle, Google Reader and Orkut. This is handy if you have, say, example.com/feed and don’t burn through a service like FeedBurner.

Links

• External pages that link to you
• Pages on your site with internal links

Sitemaps

You can upload a sitemap here.

Tools

• Analyse your robots.txt
• Enable enhanced images
• Manage your site verification
• Set crawl rate (you can slow down how often your site is crawled)
• Set preferred domain (e.g. to take out the “www” from Google search results
• Remove URLs from being indexed

It really is pretty simple to get Webmaster Tools up and running, and I find that I visit once or twice a week to make sure all is in order.

Are you using Webmaster Tools? Do you find it beneficial? What’s your favourite function?