A Beginner’s Guide to Webmaster Tools

No matter if you are a marketing pro, SEO specialist, or just someone with a website – Webmaster Tools (formerly Google Search Console) is an indispensable tool for understanding how Google sees your site.

Google Web Testing Tool (GWT) will also notify you if there are any malware issues discovered by Google. In this article we’ll cover what GWT can offer you and its basic functions.

1. Crawl

Search engines (such as Google) utilize bots that crawl websites in order to gather their information, which is then indexated so searchers can quickly and efficiently locate what they’re searching for.

A website needs to be properly indexed if it wants to rank highly for keywords, and for this to happen it needs to be crawled regularly and correctly.

Crawl is one of the most useful features in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), providing webmasters with an understanding of how Google indexes their websites. Users can explore data such as number of crawl errors or indexed pages for specific queries grouped by page URL, country and device type – providing webmasters with assurance their sites are being properly indexed while also giving them power to prompt Google to reindex certain pages again.

2. Index

Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) offers webmasters and digital marketing agencies an array of features designed to assist them with improving their websites, from identifying technical issues to tracking keyword rankings and keeping their sites operating at peak condition.

Google provides web administrators with an index coverage report to see how many of their pages are actually being indexed by them, enabling them to quickly resolve any indexing issues which prevent search results from showing their pages properly.

Backlinks reporting is another key aspect of GWT that allows webmasters to monitor who links back to them, along with any type of anchor text being utilized by these websites. This feature can help webmasters monitor how the quality of backlinks can impact SEO performance.

3. Search Analytics

Search analytics are an invaluable way to get an overview of your website’s search traffic. They allow you to see what terms people are searching with to locate content on your site, as well as the amount of times they click after finding what they were searching for.

Using this data can help optimize the content on your website to be more relevant to users, as well as decoding user intent which is an essential element in digital marketing and SEO.
From the Search Dashboard in GWT, you can gain access to search analytics by selecting from a drop-down list which View you would like to analyze, as well as selecting an available date range and date range to view data from. Once selected, various metrics can be displayed based on that view selected.

4. Structured Data Testing Tool

Structured Data Testing Tool is a free web tool that evaluates structured data markup on HTML pages to make sure they’re correctly formatted, helping search engines understand what’s on them more quickly and easily. It detects errors and warnings while giving detailed reports describing all issues.

It was designed specifically to test desktop and mobile web pages that use structured data to support special features like rich results (e.g. video carousels). It can either assess all structured data on entire pages or focus on particular parts of code snippets that use this format.

Analyzing structured data against Google Rich Results criteria, and warning of issues which could prevent you from being eligible for rich snippets, as well as errors that might impede search engine visibility, this tool scans structured data against all these criteria to detect issues that could stop you being eligible for rich results snippets. It also highlights any errors which might reduce visibility. Get to know about this Webmaster Tools in the link.

5. Sitemaps

Sitemaps help search engines find pages on your website that may otherwise be difficult to crawl, as an XML file containing each of your website’s URLs and providing information about each page like when it was last updated, its content, and any relationships to other pages on your sitemap is stored on a server.

Submitting an XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools is straightforward. A successful submission will display green “Success” status while an error might lead to red “Has errors” alerts highlighting specific issues and providing solutions.

An XML Sitemap must not exceed 50MB and 50,000 URLs or it will need to be split up into multiple files. A Sitemap may include metadata for each URL such as location (loc>), change frequency (changefreq>), and priority (priority>).