Care and Feeding of Your Website: Google Webmaster Tools

So, you have a website. It looks good, works well, and is kept updated — great! But what else should you be doing on a regular basis to ensure its success?

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google that will help you to see the “big picture” of how your site exists on the web and how you can improve both its presence and performance. To get started, log in with any Google Account. You’ll need to add your site and complete a brief verification process. Then you’re ready to go.

Here are a few things you can accomplish through Webmaster Tools:

Learn about Incoming Traffic

Understanding the intentions of incoming visitors will help you to make sure they have a positive experience on your site.

• View Top Search Queries shows when and how your web site is appearing in Google search results. Which keywords display your site the most? Which result in click-throughs? Learning the answers to these questions (and identifying the differences between them) will help you to ensure that your site’s content meets the needs of incoming traffic. If certain keywords are missing from the list or ranked lower than you would expect, you may need to add more content to your site related to that keyword and ensure that others are linking to it.

  More highlights after the jump.

• Links to Your Site shows which pages on your site are being linked to from other sites, and how many visits these links are generating. Why is this important? Maybe one of your most linked-to pages is in desperate need of an overhaul. Or maybe you’ll discover that most new visitors are not entering your site through the homepage, so they’re missing the important announcement you’ve posted there. Links to Your Site will also show you which sites visitors are coming from, which will give you even more insight into what they’re looking for.
• Keywords is a list of the most common keywords found by Google when crawling your site. Ideally, this list should reflect your site’s content. If it doesn’t, you should confirm that your site is being crawled successfully and then evaluate your content strategy and use of keywords.

Guide Google Through Your Site

Prevent Google from indexing specific pages and direct it to the ones that matter.

• Sitemaps will allow you to submit a sitemap to Google and detect problems associated with it. You won’t need to re-submit the map every time you change it, but it is worth revisiting this page to catch any problems that Google detects.
• Crawler access guides you through the process of creating and testing a robots.txt file, which tells search engines which pages or directories of your site to ignore.

Catch Problems Early

By monitoring your site proactively, you can avoid problems that result in unhappy visitors or losses in traffic.

• Site Performance (found under Labs) will show you how fast your site’s pages load and how this compares to other sites. It provides a high-level timeline chart, a list of specific pages and their load times, and then gives tips on how to speed up those pages.
• HTML Suggestions (found under Diagnostics) will identify duplicate or missing page titles and meta descriptions, which both have an impact on how visitors find your page through Google search. What makes a good page title and description? Google provides some tips on that, too.

Although these are some good starting points, this isn’t an exhaustive list of everything available in Webmaster Tools. To keep up with the latest features and best practices, visit the Google Webmaster Blog.