How to Use Google Webmaster Tools to help with SEO
If you are a new comer to Google Webmaster Tools or haven't even given it a test drive yet, you should know that there are a number of very useful tools that can help you with your site's SEO.
What better place to find out what's ailing your site than where it matters most, Google. After all, they are the ones dealing out the search rankings, and it's good to know what they think about your pages.
Rather than bombard you with the entire suite of tools, here are 4 of the most useful ones to get you started!
4 Of our favorite reports that will help your SEO
HTML improvements – The HTML Improvements report is a very handy tool indeed for SEO. It can show you things you need to be aware of, like how well or even if your Meta data is optimized, title and descriptions deficiencies, and also duplicate content issues. Well worth a look.
Search Queries – This report is by far the most useful of all. You can divine a number of great metrics, including impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate, keyword terms searched, image and video SEO and much more. While the keyword data is limited, and only extends back thirty days, it is still useful.
Crawl errors – This report will tell you exactly which pages are returning a 404 error code, that is, not found. These you'll need to take care of as quickly as possible, because you are losing traffic, and your search engine results could very well be skewed as well.
Links to your site – Knowing which sites are linking to your pages, and your most popular pages is very good site intel to have. It's not unusual to be totally surprised by what is found here, as pages you had no idea were doing this well often present themselves.
Google Web tools are a very useful tool to tell you what you need to be concerned with and fixing on your site. It should be your first stop, even though you may at some point use a more sophisticated paid tool to dive deeper.
