Google Webmaster is an extremely useful tool that can help you:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
- Track any problems with your site - e.g. missing pages, broken links etc
- Upload a Google XML sitemap to your site (see previous blog)
- Track ALL of the sites that link to you - very important for Search Engine Optimisation
- Track how your site is doing in general Google searches
- Plus a number of other advanced features
Setting up Google Webmaster
To access Google Webmaster you must further have a GOOGLE (not necessarily a Gmail) account. To sign up for the service you have to register the site you want to track and then either upload a file to your site or add some HTML code to your homepage (a META tag) so that Google can check that you do actually own the site and are authorised to monitor it.
Track who links to you
One of the most important tools is the ability to track who links to you. You may have come across the Google "link:www.sitename.com" type search before. This however only comes up with a selection of links to a site - to view all of them you need Google Webmaster.
If you have just set up Google Webmaster give it at least a few days to gather data about your site. Then go to "Links" and select "pages with external links" to track who links to you. Google will show your homepage web address and also other web pages on your site that people link to. To see who actually links to you click onto the number in the right hand column and it will reveal a list of links. You can click onto any of these to look at the page.
Monitor how you are doing in searches
Another useful feature is available via the "Statistics" view. "Within statistics click onto Top Search Queries". This will reveal two columns - one entitled impressions and the other Traffic.
The impressions column shows searches where your site was shown when someone did a search. The percentages show how frequently your site came up for that search (top 20 searches only). This column can be useful if you are targetting particular keywords to see how you are doing generally for these over time.
The second column -- "traffic" - shows what search terms resulted in people actually clicking through to your site.
You'll also see a list of months and maybe "1 week ago", "2 weeks ago" above these columns. Click onto a month or other period to see how your site performed in the past.
Finally you can change the drop down field that appears after location. As your site will perform differently in the UK to Australia and the US etc this can show how you are doing internationally. For example select "(France) google.fr" to see how your doing in France or "Google.com" to see how you are doing in the US.
