Today we celebrate one day of birth.
Google Webmaster Tools and improving performance
Content
1. About Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is by far the best tool created by Google for people who monitor the performance of a web site in the search engine Google. This tool provides us with various applications that keep us on the number of pages indexed, the way that they are distributed, internal backlinks, page load time, etc. I don't think that we have to stop chating because you will have a lot to read.
2. Set up Website
2.1 – Sitemap
This step is one of the most important of the entire Webmaster Tools process.To make your site attractive to search bots, you need to have a sitemap of the entire website. For Wordpress blogs, you can install a plugin that will do this for you. This will give a gentle nudge robots, easing the work of indexing them.
2.2 - Crawler Access
Another very important file in the structure of a website is the robots.txt file, that directly says to the search bots to index the content. If your site has content that you don't want to be indexed by Google or another search engine, configure the robots.txt file, this way indicating restricted and permitted paths of robots.
Once detected (1) Google Webmaster Tools provides us with the latest version of the file downloaded by the crawler (2), we can test with different indexing agents (4) (robots from Google) to see if a path (3) is or isn't accessible to them.
We also have a generator for these basic operations. We can determine which files / folders will be indexed by different agents, which will be restricted, etc.
2.3 - Sitelinks
Another nice thing in the searches is this Sitelinks, which represents almost six addresses within the site that are considered by a search engine relevant for your website. This feature appears from PR 4 ( i'm not sure of this information). You can block one of these links, following a reassessment of the website and replacing that adress with a new one.
2.4 – Settings
We can determine the geographic target of our readers (1), with the preferred domain (with or without www) (2). Another extremely important feature is the rate of indexation. This can be extremely resource consuming if you have a huge activity to search bots. Therefore it's recommended that when you face huge bandwidth consumption problems to take a look here and reduce the rate of indexing of the crawlers.
3. Your web site on the internet
Other important features of Google Webmaster Tools are the statistics of the website.
3.1 - Top search queries
Top Search Queries offers the opportunity to see the most popular searches (1) position, the search engine (Images, Video, Web, etc.) (2) from which the search was made and even the country (3) (google.ro, google.com, etc.).
3.2 - Links to your site
All links that are considered by Google as "recommendations" (backlinkuri) of other sites you'll see here, under the form of a table.
3.3 – Keywords
Other statistics, the same goal – the table provides a list ranking the most relevant words of the text from your pages. It can be very useful in determining the keywords and description (meta tags).
3.4 - Internal Links
This information is useful to determine if the degree distribution of links within the "tree" is beautifully organized site. The more, the better.
3.5 - Subscriber stats
If your website uses RSS data feeds, you can see the number of subscribers you have in Webmaster Tools using Google Reader.
4. Diagnostics
4.1 - Crawl errors
Google Webmaster Tools shows the errors that were detected by Google when the robots accesed the site. You will see both links that lead nowhere (broken links) and links to invalid pages but still bring traffic. After analyzing the numerous information, you can bring improvements to the site, such as: checking invalid links, edit the robots.txt file or the 404 page.
4.2 - Crawl stats
GoogleBot statistics in the last days.
4.3 - HTML suggestions
Here you can see a list of pages (articles) that have duplicate content (same title or the same meta tags). It reacts too if meta-tags are too short or too long. Correcting them will certainly lead to improved relevance to those pages.
5. Google Labs
5.1 - Fetch as Googlebot
A very useful feature I find is this Fetch as Googlebot, which we will return the HTML content of a web page. Utility is in terms of security. Some viruses, spam messages appear only if the virus code detects that a page is accessed by a robot. So, it's a beautiful way to see how Google sees the page.
5.2 - Site performance
Google Webmaster Tools continuously monitor how fast your blog loads. For a few pages are given detailed information and tips for improvement. Those information are very useful because we can know what to do to improve the speed of loading a page.
Conclusion
While it may seem a trivial application, Google Webmaster Tools is extremely interesting and has useful features that can make the difference in making a good optimization decision, meta tags laying, etc. It can also be a good solution against Web viruses.
Do you have any observations about this online application?
| There are no comments on this article. Be the first to say your opinion. |
