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Google Webmaster Tools: Tips for Site Optimisation

Google Webmaster Tools is the primary source of information about how Google is indexing your site. It’s also very useful for finding problems with your site that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Here’s a list of tips covering how to use Webmaster Tools to keep your optimisation efforts on track. I hope they’ll be useful.

1. First and foremost, check for errors. Webmaster Tools will tell when it got an error crawling your site: currently this information is to be found on the Overview page. You should look carefully into any errors that are reported and take appropriate measures to fix them. The most common errors will be “Not Found” pages; here’s why those can arise and what you should do about them:
   • Bad internal links. You may have mistyped a URL when making a link from one page to another of your site. Use Xenu Link Sleuth or a similar tool to track down such errors.

   • Out of date external links. If you have reorganised your site or migrated it to a new content management system then some page URLs may have changed. You may be able to contact some of the people whose pages link to yours and ask them to update but there will always be those who don’t respond. So what’s the answer? A custom ‘Not found’ page (often known as a ’404′ page, after the value of the error code) can be used to inform visitors about the new structure of your site, but there’s a much better answer: the good old 301 redirect.

     A 301 redirect is a special response by your web server that is more helpful than a 404 Not Found, because it tells the requesting browser (or search engine spider) what to do to get the content it’s looking for. It doesn’t just say “I can’t find what you asked for”; it says “what you asked for has been moved to this new URL” and says what that URL is. If you can supply a redirect for every out of date link, eventually the list of pages not found in Google Webmaster Tools will shrink almost to nothing (leaving only those in the next category, “weird links”).

     Unfortunately, getting your web server to issue 301 redirects generally requires some technical expertise. For Drupal sites the task is made much easier by the excellent Path Redirect module, but I’ve yet to find a good solution for WordPress.

   • “Weird” external links. Some of the Not Found pages reported by Webmaster Tools may be to strange URLs that bear no resemblance to any ever found on your site. Don’t bother redirecting those.

2. Check external links. Whether you are conducting an active SEO effort or simply keeping an eye on the popularity of your site, you’ll want to know about the external links to your site. Google provides you with not only a list of all the sites that link to yours (under Links-> Pages that link to yours) but also the keywords that appear in those links (under the rather misleading heading Statistics ->How Googlebot sees your site).

   Unfortunately at the moment there is no direct connection between these two lists (and they appear on different pages of the Webmaster Tools interface), but they will help you to discover how well linked your site is, and how many of your favourite keywords appear in the text of links coming in to it.

3. Check internal links. While Google’s view of your internal links is typically several days out of date, it’s always worth casting a quick eye over the reports for internal links, looking for any issues. The list of keywords for internal link text can be particularly revealing about how well it is optimised.

4. Check top search queries. Google Analytics will tell you which queries result in actual visits to your site; Webmaster Tools provides a complementary view showing searches for which your site gets a high position in the list. Ideally there should be a strong correlation between one and the other, and both lists should be full of the keywords you are trying to optimise for.

   If you are getting into results lists but not getting clicks, this indicates your listings don’t look relevant when they appear. You should run those searches yourself and look critically at how your site looks to search users. A well-crafted Meta Description tag may be the answer.

   If you are mainly getting listed for irrelevant or less valuable keywords, it’s time to get down to some serious optimisation. Sign up for a keyword research account with Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or Nichebot then apply the fruits of your research to your pages.

These are just the aspects of Webmaster Tools I find particularly useful. There’s rather more to it than what I’ve covered here; and Google keep adding new features and improving the old ones, so it’s getting better all the time. It may not look as exciting as Google Analytics but it’s a must for anyone who manages a web site.