In case you are not aware, the best and most used search engine at the moment is Google. Thus, it is important that your site/blog is Google friendly. In other words, as a site owner, you should make sure that your site is indexed properly by Google. As we all know (and some might not) that search engines can bring you a lot of new traffic and help people to find you. If you want to be a successful site owner then you got to be able to optimize your site for Google and hopefully your site will show up at the top page of Search Engine Result Page (SERP). So how do you make Google to like you?. Simple!. Google provides its tools that allow you to do just that. Now you can track and maintain your site with Google Webmaster Tools. The best thing of this tools is they are FREE!.
1. Create an account and submit your site
First and foremost, in order to use Google Webmaster Tools you must have a Google account. Luckily, that is free too. Just go to www.google.com/mail and sign up. With your Google account, just sign into Google webmaster tools and go to the Dashboard, type the site URL in the “Add site” field. Make sure you type the entire URL, such as http://www.example.com/. Once your site is added, it will appear in the Site column. Click the Verify link beside the site and verify site ownership to see detailed statistics and errors for it. There are two ways to verify the ownership to your site. From the verification page, you can choose the verification method that works best for you. You can choose “Add a Meta tag” or “Upload an HTML file”. I recommend the former, as it is much easier. Just login to your blog and add the meta tag into your header portion of your blog.
2. Submit your sitemap
The next step is to submit your sitemap. Basically, a sitemap is a summarized version of your site. By submitting your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, it assists the Googlebot to keep track of your site by providing “hints” like the last modified date and approximate change frequency. Submission of sitemap is simple. If you are a Blogger user, then your sitemap is http://www.example.blogspot.com/atom.xml. For Wordpress user, your sitemap should be http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Set Preferred Domain
One of the common mistake for site owners is that they treat their site domain (http://www.example.com) and the non-www version of the domain (http://example.com) as the same. However, for search engine, these two domains are treated to be two different sites. Therefore, it is best that you choose one domain and stick with it. You can set the preferred domain in Google Webmaster tools. The Set Preferred Domain feature enables you to tell us if you’d like URLs from your site crawled and indexed using the www version of the domain (http://www.example.com) or the non-www version of the domain (http://example.com). For my blog, I set http://www.kuanhoong.com as the preferred domain.
4. Check your Page Analysis
If you would like to check on how are all your keywords performing for your site, the best place is to do so is check your Page Analysis report. This report shows you the top phrases that other sites use to link to the pages of your site. From this report, you can also see the variations of each phrase for your site (for instance, with different capitalization and punctuation), report showing the most common individual words in anchor text and 100 most common words in anchor text and in your site. (This is another good way to check keyword density for your site). For example, if you like your visitors to be able to find you in Google by using the keywords “Make Money Online“, then you should make sure that most of the sites that are linked to you are using by the keywords “Make Money Online” as the anchor text for the link.
5. Check Web crawl errors
Web Crawl Errors page lists URLs from your site that Google’s web crawler, Googlebot had trouble crawling. Googlebot found these pages either in your Sitemap or by following links from other pages during a discovery crawl. Site owner should check this page often to see what are the problems faced by Googlebot. You can check the detailed information on certain errors by clicking an error category. There are 6 types or errors :
6. Check External and Internal Links
With Google Webmaster tools, you can check all the links to pages on your site that can be found on the web. Links can be divided into External and Internal links. External links to your site are the links that reside on pages that do not belong to your domain. While Internal links to your site are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain. To view the links to your site, just select a verified site in your webmaster tools account and clicking on the new Links tab at the top. Once there, you will see the two options on the left: external links and internal links. In the detailed view, you’ll see the list of all the pages that link to specific page on your site, and the time Google crawled that link. In summary, you can see all the sites out there that actually linked to you. Cool huh. 
7. Enhanced image search
Often as a site owner, we focus on search engine optimization for the content to promote or drive traffic to your site, Google Image Search is often overlooked. While ranking for terms in Google Image Search is unlikely to ever bring you massive amounts of traffic but the traffic gains you do make more than make up for the effort. Now with Google Webmaster Tools, you have the choice to choose to opted-in to enhanced image search. With this option set, Google will use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.
8. Set Googlebot Crawl Rate
Googlebot uses sophisticated algorithms that determine how much to crawl each site. The main objective is to make sure that Googlebot crawl as many pages from your site as many times as possible without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth. If bandwidth is not a main problem for you, then it is recommended that you change crawl rate to Faster. With faster Google crawl rate, any latest changes in your content will be picked up by Googlebot and instantly reflected in the search engine result page.
9. Check Query stats
Another good tool from Google Webmaster Tools is the Query stats. It provides information about search queries that have returned pages from your site. Stats that may be available are:
- Top search queries - list the top queries that return results from your site. Note that this list is unrelated to where your site is listed in the search results.
- Top search query clicks - the top search queries that directed traffic to your site. These are the top searches that caused users to click on a link to your site.
In summary, Query Stats is another good measurement on the performance for your keywords.
10. Requesting removal of content from our index
As a site owner, you control what content of your site is indexed in search engines. The easiest way to let search engines know what content you don’t want indexed is to use a robots.txt file or robots meta tag. But sometimes, you want to remove content that’s already been indexed. What’s the best way to do that?. For sites that you’ve verified ownership for in your webmaster tools account, you can remove unwanted links by using URL Removals. If a request is successful, it appears in the Removed Content tab and you can reinclude it any time simply by removing the robots.txt or robots meta tag block and clicking Reinclude.
So that are the 10 basic SEO steps by using the Google Webmaster Tools. All you got to do is to submit your site now and the rest you can leave it to the power al the almighty God *cough Google.
To know more about Google Webmaster Tools, check out these sites:
