What is Google Webmaster Tools?

Google is well and truly at the centre of the online universe, providing many of the services we use in our everyday lives, but for someone who isn’t necessarily technically minded, it can be hard to keep up with what’s what. 

More than likely in your travels in getting a website you would have heard some names bantered around and weren’t really known what they were.

One of them is Google Webmaster Tools. Please note this is not to be confused with Google Analytics.

What is it?

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google that allows webmasters (anyone who administers a webpage, whether it be people who manage content, web developers or SEO companies) to monitor how Google interacts with a website.

This isn’t a magic service that will get you to the top of the Google rankings, however it will allow you to analyse what Google knows about your website so that you can optimise it’s visibility to the Googlebot (the name for Google software that collects information about websites to build the index for Google’s search engine).

What does it provide?

There are many weird and wonderful tools that the service provides, but here is a quick list of the important ones:

• Alerts – Receive automated messages and alerts from Google about any problems that may affect your websites search rankings (including site intrusion detection).
• Sitemaps – Submit your websites sitemap and monitor how Google using it.
• Backlinks – Check in-bound links from other sites to your website.
• Exclusion – Submit your websites robots.txt file (which controls what Google should and shouldn’t index on your website).
• Broken Links – List any broken links within your website.
• Removal – Request pages on your website to be removed from Google search.
• Suggestions – Any problems or possible improvements in your site titles and descriptions.
• Search Queries – Impressions and click through rates for search terms.
• Index & Crawl Stats – Statistics on how Google has crawled and indexed your web pages.

How can I use it?

Anyone who has a website can create a Google Webmaster Tools account. All you need to do is sign up or login using your existing Google account.

Once you are logged in, you can proceed to the Google Webmaster Tools home.

You will then need to add your website and verify that you own it to start connecting your website with the Google Webmaster tools system. You many need some help from your web developer to do this.

Conclusion

Google Webmaster Tools can be a very handy tool not only for SEO companies but for anyone who has a website to better understand how your website looks from Google’s viewpoint. This can be very important, however remember that Google suggests that content on your website should be for your customers and not Google.