Improving Your SEO with the Help of Google’s Webmaster Tools

One of the best resources out there for getting your site ranking well in Google web searches is offered by Google. Using Google Webmaster Tools, you can have your site analyze and figure out the factors that are detracting from your site’s SEO potential or making it so that your site is being favored by Google and other search engines. Among the factors analyzed by Webmaster Tools are page crawl statistics, errors on website pages, and rich snippets. If you are a newcomer to SEO or this package of optimization resources, consider the five methods described below for furthering site optimization using the resources Google provides for webmasters. 

• Improving HTML- You can access tools that will assist you with improving HTML on your site under the Search Appearance menu in Webmaster Tools. Using Search Appearance, you can get a snapshot of data on the title tags and meta descriptions of your website. This report will also include information on content on your site that is not indexable. From an SEO perspective, it’s important to make sure that all of your meta descriptions are unique. Also, you can optimize your title tags properly using the Search Appearance report. 

• Analyzing keywords- One of the menus under the Google Index is Content Keywords. Using the Content Keywords tool, it is possible to get an insight into how Google is viewing your site depending on the keywords around which your site seems to be optimized. This tool will take a look at the keywords that your site includes and show how/for what they are significant. While it’s generally pretty obvious which keywords around which you want to optimize you site- for example a payday loans lender might use instant same day loan, etc.- sometimes finding the best keywords can take a bit of study. Using the Content Keywords tool, you can determine if you need to include your keywords more in your site content or if your keywords are overly dense within the content on your site.  

• Sitemap use- Sitemaps are an important aspect of a website’s optimization. You can use the Sitemaps section of Google Webmaster Tools to determine if there are any errors in your sitemap that you need to address. Some of the data given by the Sitemap use tool include how many pages have been submitted and indexed with your sitemap and when was the last date on which the sitemap was processed.

• Data markup- You can use resources under the Other Resources heading in Google Webmaster Tools to access the Structured Data Markup Helper, which will assist you in tagging data fields on your site that point out various events or products. The Structured Data Markup Helper puts a somewhat complicated SEO task into a simple a straight-forward, point-and-click tool that just about anyone can use to optimize data fields.

• Taking advantage of structured data- You can introduce search engines to the content of your site by taking advantage of the concept of structured data. Structured data resources in Google Webmaster Tools- under Search Appearance- are typically utilized in SEO through rich snippets that are showed in SERPS (search engine results pages).