Google Webmaster Tools - Part One
Google Webmaster Tools is collection of useful tools for every webmaster. If you have a Gmail account go to http://www.google.com/webmastertools. and login with your user name (email address on Gmail) and password. If you don’t have Gmail account, you sholuld create one. You use same account to login to other Google’s services like AdSense, AdWords, Reader…
After logging in you can add your website to Webmaster Tools. After adding URL of your site you have to verify that you are the owner of the web site. The simplest way to do it is to create HTML verification file and upload it to your web server (choose option “Upload HTML file”). Copy name of verification file (it will be something like google16sfddafdfvdf178295f3.html). Open Notepad, choose option file>save as, paste file name in “File Name” field, and choose “All files” as type of the file in the”Save as type” field.
After verification Google will provide some interesting information about your site. One of the most interesting things is “Top Search Queries”. Left column of this report will show you top 20 queries in which your site appeared, and the percentage of the top 20 queries represented by each search. This actually means that my blog appeared in, for example, 1000 queries last week, and 30% of all queries was “how to make blog”.
Last column is “Position”, it shows position of your web site in search results. I have to mention that this position refers to site’s average position in Google search. For example your site can be on 5th position for some search on google.de (if you live in Germany), but it can be on third page on google.com.
It is possible to see top search queries from different locations (as you can see on image). It is very useful, because information about top clicked queries can be different, depending on location. It might be a consequence of different search results in localized searches and/or different interest of people searching from different locations. This information can help you in optimizing your site for other markets.
Right column shows queries which actually brought people to your site. This can be very helpful. Maybe you had an idea to optimize your web site for one keyword or a phrase, but after few months you see that other keyword you didn’t even think of brings more visitors. So you can focus your optimization efforts to this keyword. I will write more about web site optimization in following posts.
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I finally decided to write a comment on your blog. I just wanted to say good job. I really enjoy reading your posts.
Tina Russell