Dipping into the Blogpond

I only became aware of Google Webmaster Tools about six weeks ago, and I think it is a really valuable tool.

We currently use Google Analytics to monitor traffic, Google Adwords and more recently Google Adsense and have found all these service to be really terrific (only negative is the occasional delay of Analytics, but then it IS free).

The Webmaster tools has four tabs, “Diagnostic”, “Statistics”, “Links” (new) and “Sitemaps”. Below is an overview of what I have found most useful in administering our websites (dLook and Obits).

Diagnostic

The diagnostic summary tells you when Google last crawled your site and crawl errors it came up with. This is really handy for finding “page not found” (404 errors), analysis of your robots.txt, and any pages restricted by the robots.txt. It also shows “crawl rate” over the last 90 days – the maximum, minimum and average number of pages crawled.

Statistics

Crawl Stats – tells you about the distribution of PageRank (high, medium, low, PageRank not yet assigned) across your site, and the page with the highest PageRank per month.

Query Stats – I love this page! Rather than repeating search after search to see where your site is ranking for a specific search term, this page links you to various Google domains (e.g. you can see where you are in Google.com or Google.com.au). The results are displayed in a table which shows terms that are the most searched after, which are most clicked through, and where you rank. It’s really rewarding to see the terms you have been targetting getting (closer) to number one – eg funeral notices and death notices.

Index Stats: provide quick links to “site:www.domain.com”, “link:”, “cache:”, “info:” and “related:”

Links (new)

External Links – This shows you how many backlinks are pointing to various pages on your domain and has a handy .csv download function. This is a really great function and shows you more links than you would have imagined you had.

Internal Links – This shows what pages your domain is linking to within itself.

So if anyone is administering a website, I’d urge you to have a look at the webmaster tools, as there is a wealth of information which could assist you with your search engine optimisation – I know it has for me.