Why use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

If you are a newcomer to Google Webmaster Tools or haven’t even given it a test drive yet, you should know that there are a number of very useful tools that will help you with your site’s SEO.

What better place to find out what’s wrong with your site than the place where it matters most, Google. After all, they are the ones dealing out the search rankings, and it’s useful to know what they think about your pages.

Google Webmaster Tools is a huge suite of tools. But for now let’s focus on 4 areas that will give you a lot of value for your money.

Help your SEO with Four Of our Favorite Reports

HTML improvements – The HTML Improvements report is a very handy tool for SEO. It can show you things you need to be aware of, like how well or even if your Meta data is optimized, title and descriptions deficiencies, as well as duplicate content issues. Well worth a look.

Search Queries – The single most useful report by far, Search Queries returns loads of data including impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate, keyword terms searched, image and video SEO and a lot more. The keyword section only goes back for 30 days, but it does give you some data you can plug into other tools.

Crawl errors – The Crawl Errors report shows you which of your pages aren’t resolving to their requested URL. This normally shows up in the form of a 404 Page not found error. It’s very useful to have this information, as it may be a simple matter of fixing a URL, link or redirecting.

Links to your site – This one returns a list of sites that are linking to your pages, and will reveal what pages are drawing the most interest. This can be, and often is, very surprising, as pages or content you might not have thought was significant could possibly be drawing loads of traffic to your site!

Using Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

Google Webmaster tools are a very useful tool to let you know what you need to be concerned with and fixing within your SEO. It ought to be your first stop, even though you may eventually use a more sophisticated paid tool to dive deeper.