Free Google Website Tools Webmasters Should Know About
If you have a website, there are a number of free tools available for webmasters through Google that are absolutely indispensable in helping you increase your website’s visibility and traffic. The Google search engine is one of the most popularly used search tools on the Internet. You can find these tools by going to Google.com and then clicking on business Ranking high in the results for keyword phrases that relate to your products or service is going to increase your traffic and increase your sales. Google provides a number of free tools that help you see exactly how well your website is doing and show you what you need to improve, what pages are not ranking and what is working for you.
Though Google offers a number of different tools for a small fee, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on Google Webmaster Tools. This free service let’s you know a number of pieces of valuable information about your website. First, you have to verify that you own the site by adding a specified meta tag to the header of your home page or upload an HTML file. Once you do this, you will be better equipped to optimize your site.
Google Webmaster Tools: Diagnostics
Googlebot is the web crawler that searches the Internet to find relevant pages that match up with the search terms people enter on Google’s search engine. The diagnostics section focuses on what Googlebot comes up with when it crawls your site as well as your site’s mechanics.
Web Crawl-This shows you if there are any errors or problems that Googlebot encounters when it crawls your site.
Content Analysis-Problems with your site’s meta tags, meta titles and descriptive information will show up here.
Mobile Crawl-Problems and errors on pages designed for mobile phone viewing are found here.
Google Webmaster Tools: Statistics
This set of tools focuses on the traffic that is coming to your site and how it is getting there.
Top Search Queries – Find out which keyword terms people are using that generate your site in the results list, the percentage of clicks you got when pages from your site were shown, and what number on the list pages of your site appear in the Google search engine.
Crawl Stats-this shows you a bar graph of how your pages are faring in PageRank as rated when crawled by Google’s Googlebot. They are shown as ranking high, medium, low or not yet assigned.
Subscriber Stats-If you have subscriber feeds like RSS or Atom available on your site, this will show you how many subscribers you have to those feeds.
What Googlebot Sees-this shows you what phrases and content are used in external links to your site. It helps if these phrases are related to the content, products and services on your site to help generate the appropriate traffic.
Index Stats-this tool lets you see what pages have links to your site and how your pages are indexed by Google.
Google Webmaster Tools: Links
Pages with External Links-Here you will see which pages on your website have inbound links coming from other websites.
Pages with Internal Links-here you can find out which of your pages have links pointing to them from other pages on your site.
Sitelinks-This shows you which of your links may appear directly in Google’s search results.
Google Webmaster Tools: Tools
There are a number of other tools that you can utilize free of charge as well. For example, you can submit a site map with all the pages on your site to expedite the process of including every page in your site on Google’s search engine. You can also:
Analyze robots.txt
Generate robots.txt
Set Geographic Target
Enhanced Image Search
Manage Site Verification
Set Crawl Rate
Set Preferred Domain
Remove URLs
Before you invest in any pricey ranking tools or analytic software, check out what Google has to offer for free!