Jonny Thirkill

Google Webmaster Tools

You may or may not know about Google’s webmaster tools. They are a key into getting your website as high as possible in the Google search. Google has provided a large set of features that you can fill in to alert Google about your website.

Once you have signed up to Google’s Webmaster tools you will need to verify your website. You can do this by either creating a file on your websites FTW with a unique name which Google can then try link to and if it finds it you are verified. Another way is to add a meta tag again with a unique name.

Then you can start telling Google about your website. You can use a feature called web crawl which uses Google’s data to tell you if you have any broken links, HTTP errors, URL’s Not Allowed, URL’s Restricted by robots, URL’s timed out and Unreachable URL’s.

You can then use this data to fix the problems, if any. If you fix all these it will increase your chance of getting higher on the search engines.

Another great feature thrown in is Statistics. You can use this to find out which are more popular search terms, crawl stats and loads of other cool stuff.

The links tab lets you see which pages on your site link to external sources, which pages link to internal sources and site links.

But by far the best feature that you need to use is the submit sitemap. This helps Google index all the pages on your site. It will help get your new content out onto Google faster and might even make you rank higher on Google’s search.

The sitemap I submitted I used a plug-in for Wordpress. It auto creates the sitemap and updates it when new information is published. The plug-in can be downloaded here. The site map it generated for me is located here.

I hope you found this information useful. Please leave a comment. If you want to contact me directly send me an email.