subject: Use Google Webmaster Tools For Website Marketing [print this page] In website marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO) is one strategy you cannot do without. But the field of SEO is wide and varied. To help you find out how well your campaign is doing, it is best to open a Google Webmaster Tools account. With Google's shift to personalised and localised search results, it has become very crucial to determine your "average position" in Google.
The Google Webmaster Tools will let you know the exact keywords that are driving traffic to your website. And the results may sometimes even be surprising. In fact, it is even possible that a high average position for your selected keyword may not generate as much traffic as a keyword where you have a lower average position! This just means that you are not optimising your site the correct way.
Given these advantages, it is really recommended for you to open a webmaster account with Google. But there are actually marketers who prefer not to open one because of they implement "black hat" techniques for certain site while keeping others legitimate. While this reason is understandable, web masters who utilise this technique will also lose out on free and comprehensive information available from Google.
Signing Up for the Google Webmaster Tools
After you have signed up for the Google Webmaster Tool, simply add and verify the information for the websites you want to tract. You can view the data on those sites after that. The fact that the search engines make an effort to personalise and localise results mean that you will most possibly get higher rankings in your home country than in others.
In addition, sites will rank differently at different time frames. Your site, as it is displayed in the search engine results page (SERP) right now might be different after a few minutes. That's why the average ranking is very meaningful. Some of the data that will be displayed on your dashboard include the following:
* Search Queries - the top queries or search terms used by users to find and access your site (this includes the clicks and page impressions).
* Keywords - the keywords identified when the search engine crawled site pages
* Inbound Links - this is the number of links to your site counted by Google's spiders
But more than getting data, it is crucial to make sense of the available information. When you click on the "+" sign after the keyword phrase, Google will display the number of clicks, impressions, and CTR. Also, it will provide information on the specific pages that received impressions and clicks for your selected keywords.
