How to increase search engine positions using Webmaster Tools

All the big search engines provide a “Webmaster tools” service.  These services are used by web developers, or 'webmasters',  to alter their websites and control how they interact with search engine spiders.  This is an essential aspect to search engine optimisation - if the search engine spiders have trouble accessing your content then you will never rank well in the results pages!

This hub will provide a simple guide to setting up Google Webmaster Tools and how to get the best out of all of its bells and whistles.  Bing and Yahoo both have their own webmaster tools services, but the principles are very much the same as Google's, and seeing as Google is a bit bigger than them, if youre going to spend time just setting up one Webmaster Tools account it may as well be them!

• Login to Google using your current, active Google account e.g. the one you use to access AdWords, Gmail, Analytics etc...
  

• Once logged in, follow this link to access the Webmaster Tools service:
  

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

• Now add your site - making sure you type in the correct URL in full

• Now Google will ask you to prove that you own the website.  You have four different options to verify that you are the webmaster of this site, but  if you have FTP access we would recommend uploading the file Google provides onto your server
  

• Once you have completed one of the verify ownership tasks you then simply click the verification link.  Google will then look for the file, or meta tag etc... to confirm you are the owner of the site

• When this is done and the verification process was successful you will find yourself in the  Webmaster Tools dashboard

Congratulations, you have successfully set up a Webmaster Tools account with Google - we told you it was simple!

On the left hand side menu of Webmaster Tools you will see the 'Site Configuration' menu, which has several sub-menus (we expand upon the items in italics below):

• Sitemaps
• Crawler access
• Sitelinks
• Change of address
• Settings
  

Sitemaps

This section allows you to upload your xml sitemap to Googe, which makes it easier for Google to spider your content - and tells the spiders what content is new

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are extra links that are sometimes displayed under the first website in search results. Google decides what links from the site to display;  although you have no control over what links are shown you can block the links that you don't want showing in this section of Webmaster Tools. Once you have blocked a link, Google will suggest other ones, so this is worth checking and editing once every so often to make sure you get the pages you want displayed

The next menu item is 'Your Site On The Web', which has a lot of useful info pertaining to how Google currently sees your site, it has the following sub-menus:

• Search queries
• Links to your site
• Keywords
• Internal links
• Subscriber stats

Search queries

This is an extremely useful section of Webmaster Tools which allows you to view detailed info regarding the keywords that your site is found for, including:

• average position
• amout of impressions (normally over the previous 30 days),
• the numbers of clicksto your site from Google
• click through rate or CTR (which is the percentage of clicks divided by amount of impressions)

This data is invaluable to search marketers as it provides the oppurtunity to link Analytics data (i.e. non-paid visits) and estimates of search volumes (e.g. Google Keyword tool).

Links to your site

To find the number of external, inbound links to your site (or a competitors) then you can search for "link:myurl" - for example link:www.anicca-solutions.com.

However, the results each search engine will show will be different - Google usually shows a lot less than Yahoo's Site Explorer, and neither provide a true reflection of how many inbound links to your site they have found.

This part of Webmaster Tools allows you to see in detail how many inbound links there are to each page of your site. There is also a function to display the anchor text used in the inbound links.

Although this section is more useful for those of a more technical persuasion, Google explains the info in a way that is fairly comprehensible.The diagnostics section highlights any technical problems that Google has found with your site, focused on the following issues:

• Malware
• Crawl errors
• Crawl stats
• html suggestions

These are important for SEO, because if Google is havong trouble spidering your site and finding all your content then you will not rank very well.

'Labs' is the last menu option and has several useful setions:

• Fetch as Googlebot
• Sidewiki
• Site performance
• Video sitemaps

Site performance

The Google Caffeine update has put a lot of emphasis on download speeds - the faster your site, the better it will rank. The 'site performance' section gives you data showing the download speed of your site.

Anicca Solutions Limited is a web development and online marketing agency based in Leicester, UK