Google Webmaster is an amazing tool and if you are a serious blogger then you will never avoid Google webmaster tool. It is also a life saviour from an SEO point of view, it gives complete information about your website in Google search engine.
Webmaster tool offers many tools that will help you analyze your blog completely and you can also make your blog rank better in the search engine by working on them. Just remember that search engine optimization is a gradual process and it cannot be achieved in one night. Sometimes it takes weeks even months. I will not talk about backlinks and other strategies to improve rank here. Instead in this post, I will tell how you can optimize your blog for search engines by using a free SEO tool like Google Webmaster tool.
Here I am sharing some tips which will help you to make full use of Google search console tool (formerly also called webmaster tool).
How to make your blog search friendly using Search Console tool
Submit Sitemap to Google Webmaster
This is the first thing you should do. Generate your blog’s sitemap and submit it to Google webmaster tool. This will help Google to crawl your website properly. And with this, you will also be able to track how many links Google is indexing. If you have not yet submitted the sitemap, submit the sitemap to Google webmaster tool today.
Google Webmaster settings
Webmaster settings allow you to enable some important things like Geographical target etc. If your blog or service is limited to a particular region, then configure it like this. For example One of my client’s WordPress blog is for Australian kids fashion. Therefore the geographical target of his blog is set to Australia. The same should happen with your blog or service here. If your blog is globally targeted, then leave it as it is. WordPress itself concerns www and non-www. However, I would suggest that you go to Google webmaster tool and configure this settings. Crawl rate depends on how often you update your blog. I always leave it to Google. However, it updates your blog several times a day and in the week.
Manage your site’s Google site link
Some time ago Shoutmeloud got a site link and if you do not know what the site link is then read here. Site links are the pages of your site and website that Google considers useful, and from my experience, I would like to say that the pages you link more often determine the site link. Sometimes Google makes less useful posts and pages like disclaimer and privacy policy as site links. In this case you can configure your website’s site links with this feature of webmaster tool. You cannot insert links to include in your website site links, but from here you can definitely block unwanted links.
site analysis
When it comes to maintaining the search engine ranking and improving it, finding the top ranking keyword is the biggest challenge. The search queries feature of Google webmaster tool will tell you which one is ranking the keyword. Along with this, you have a position on Google and how many links are linked to the post . They have improved it some time ago and have also added post link and search engine placement feature to it. You can also use wordpress plugin like SEO Smart Link to change the keyword to auto link. This will also keep your ranking and it will push your post from the second page to the first page as well.
Keyword
It is more important to rank for the right keyword rather than to rank for the wrong keyword. If your blog is about shoes and you rank with keywords like shirts and trousers, even on the first page, your traffic is useless. Google Webmaster tool determines which keywords to use when crawling a site.
If you are ranking on the wrong keyword, then your strategy should be that you find it and try to show related and useful keyword search engine.
There are other tools like website speed, internal links, crawl errors, which are very important . I would suggest you to pay a little attention to your Google Webmaster tool today and come back to this post with your queries. You can tell us your queries by commenting.
Also tell us which feature of Google Webmaster tool did you find most useful?
