Google Webmaster Tools - part 2
In this post I’ll write more about interesting features of Google Webmaster Tools.
Diagnostics
When you login to your Google Webmaster Tools account you’ll notice link on the left navigation panel called “Diagnostics”. Click on this link, and then click on “Content analysis”.
Google will analise pages in your website to see if there are any mistakes that can have negative effects on site’s position in search results. Common mistakes are: pages without title tag, duplicate title tags, title tags that are too long or too short, duplicate meta description tag, meta description that is too long or too short. Google will warn you if there are any issues with title tags and meta description, so you can change bad titles and meta descriptions.
Maybe you heard that meta tags are no longer important for search engines. Well, that’s true, but meta description tag still has some value. Meta description is, as it name says, tag that contains description of a page. If meta description exists, Google will show it in search results as a description of a page. It is very important that meta description contains text that is relevant to website’s content (if you optimize page for some phrase, use that phrase in title, meta description and in text). Length of meta description should be one or two simple sentences.
What googlebot sees?
Important feature in category “Statistics” is “What googlebot sees”. Googlebot is Google’s “robot” which crawls your website. On this page you can see how Googlebot sees content of your home page. You can also see anchor text of external links to your website (anchor text is text used on other webiste to link to a page in your website).
As you probably know, one of the most important issues that influences ranking of your web pages on Google and other search engines are number of sites linking to your website and LINK QUALITY.
Link quality depends on:
- anchor text
- page rank of page that contains link
Anchor text should contain keywords and phrases relevant for your website. I wanted to optimize this blog for phrase “how to make blog”. As you can see on image above, external links to my site are containing that keyword, and that keywords are contained in blog’s title, heading and content. By using data on this page you can compare content of your website with anchor text of external links to your web site. If content doesn’t match anchor text, those links will be very weak.
Every page that has page rank can pass some “link juice” to your page affecting page rank of linked page in your website. The more quality links you have, with good page rank of page containing that link, the better position of your website will be in search results. As you can see, this blog is positioned on first page of search results in Google for phrase “how to make blog” among 104.000.000 pages containing these words. This blog still doesn’t have many inbound links (external links to my site), but those links are quality ones. If you have hundreds of non-quality links it will have small effect on your website’s ranking (that’s reason why links from directories have very small effect on ranking in search results).
How to get quality links? That’s subject for other post.
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