subject: The Advantages of Webmaster Tools [print this page] Author: Marcus Sen Author: Marcus Sen
There are many advantages to the Webmaster Tools offered by Google, Yahoo! and Bing. While on first glance it may not seem as helpful as web analytics, these tools give web designers valuable information on how these search engines view your site and any errors there are on it. They do not however give you any information on your users or traffic as analytics do. To setup an account with webmaster tools you will first need to visit the site and enter the URL of your website. You will then be asked to verify your site by either uploading a specific file or entering some meta information in the head area of the homepage. Once verified you can upload a sitemap in a text or XML format. Either is fine and will allow you to tell the engines what pages exist on your site to spider. It can take some time for the engines to download these sitemaps and follow the links but its worth the wait. Its also worth adding a robots.txt file in the root of the site, telling the search engines which pages not to index. Once this has been done you can then gain valuable information on what these engines see in your site. Some of the most useful things are the number of links to your site and the pages that are being linked to, key words and phrases that your site is being listed for and clicked through to and any errors that there may be in the site, such as dead links. Google places significant importance on links to your site so it is wise to monitor these links and continue to gain links to your site from other legitimate sites on the web. Webmaster tools will also report the internal links you have within your site. Perhaps most significantly of all, you can study the keywords and phrases that your site is being indexed and listed for in search results, known as an impression and the click through rate for these impressions. You will be able to see firstly if these keywords and phrases are relevant to you and the rankings currently attained. This serves as a good basis to start your search engine optimisation campaign as you can target keywords and phrases that you are not listed for or improve rankings that you are listed for. Lastly, any errors within the site will be reported here such as pages that can not be found, meta tags that have been duplicated or missing or that are perhaps not descriptive enough. You can review this information and tweak the meta information on your pages so its more relevant and descriptive If necessary. Web designers gain a huge amount of information from these tools which once understood can benefit website rankings hugely.About the Author:
This article has been written by a professional web designer. Please contact www.peppercorn.co.uk for more information.
