Google Webmaster Tools is a free web service of Google where webmasters can configure different options on how they would like Google to crawl their site.
It is a little known service of Google but in this article I will dwell upon what a blogger can achieve by adding his/her blog in Google Webmaster Tools. So let’s begin.
Before you can start to use Google Webmaster tools, you need to do a couple of basic things.
Pre-requisites
Step – I – Create a Google Account
To sign in into Google Webmaster Tools you need a Google account.If you don’t have one you can create one here.
Step – II – Add your blog to your account
Then sign into the service and add your blog to your account.
Step – III – Verify your ownership
It will ask for verifying your ownership of your blog. There are two options, you can add a Meta Tag or upload an empty HTML file with the name Google has specified in the instructions.For Blogger users, only the option of adding Meta tag can be used. So copy the meta tag and paste it in your template editor just below your <head> tag. Save your template and republish. Your site can now be verified. Bloggers who have their own hosted installations of WordPress can upload a HTML file with the name specified by Google into their root folder. Then you can verify your ownership.
After finishing these basic steps now you can start utilizing the features of Google Webmaster tools.
Utilizing Google Webmaster Features
Feature I – Add a sitemap for your blog
This step is not possible for those having their blogs on . Only bloggers who have their own WordPress installation can do this.
- Download and install the Google Sitemaps Generator plugin from here.
- Configure the plugin to create your blog’s sitemap at http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
- Now go back to Google Webmaster tools and click on your site’s name there. Under the Sitemaps tab click “Add a Sitemap” and select “General Web Sitemap”.Now give the location of the sitemap you created above.
The sitemap you just added will be helpful to Google in crawling your site. Next time whenever you update your site, Google will get a notification that you have written new content.
Feature II – Set the crawl rate
You can set the rate at which the Google Bot crawls your site. There are three options Faster, Slower and Normal. If you are a blogger who does not like to wait to get their blog posts to be included in the search engine, then set the rate to “Faster”.Google Bot will crawl your site as often as possible.
Feature III – Set your preferred domain name
Here you can set whether you want your domain name to be displayed with or without the www prefix, in the search results.
Feature IV – Enable enhanced image search
Enable Enhanced Image Search for your blog. This will enable Google to include your images in Google Image Search Results. If you want to know what “Enhanced Image Search” is then see this.
Feature V – See search query terms for which your blog features in the results
Under the Statistics tab, there is the best feature of all: “Query Stats”. The query stats lists keywords for which your blog featured in the search results. It also lists the position in which your blog figured in the search results.
You can utilize this feature to improve your ranking in Google for different queries. If your rank for a query is low, open up that blog post which contains that query and edit the post trying to repeat the aforementioned query as often as possible. This will improve your ranking in search engine results translating into more traffic from Google.