If you are dipping your toes into the SEO waters for the first time then setting up your website on Google Webmaster Tools should be part of your set-up plan.
For Irish Internet users, Google is the dominant force. More people use Google than all the other search engines put together. Chances are that for many small businesses your Google traffic will outstrip all other traffic sources combined. Therefore, it is wise to understand and to view how Google sees and interprets your site. GWT helps you to see your website through Google(y) eyes
My top 5 reasons for using GWT:
1. Site Troubleshooting
GWT contains a category called Diagnostics. This category has options that will inform you if Google has problems crawling through your site. It can also make HTML suggestions that will help you to improve your website. Website owners need to know if there are any issues with the site that would prevent it from ranking high. This option will help shed some light on that situatation
2. Indexing
Google treats every page of your site individually, therefore it is highly important that all the pages of your website are indexed. Only when your pages are indexed will they start appearing on Google search results.
If you decided to target a new service and created a new landing page for this targeting keywords related to that service, then you want to make sure that Google will find your page. Search engines have the ability to find this new page naturally but there is no guarantee and the process can be slow at times. If you want to ensure your whole site gets indexed then use the sitemaps functionality to help that happen.
3. Link Analysis
Inbound links to your website is probably the most important ranking factor there is. Any information that Google can give you about these links is important. In GWT, there are options for ‘Links to Your Site’ and ‘Internal Links’. Both of these options will give you a very rough indication of the amount and type of links in your site. It is not accurate but it is good to be able to see what Google sees.
4. Site Speed
This has become a ranking factor recently. While there are plenty of websites and software programs that can tell you how fast your website is, it is useful to see what Google itself thinks of your site speed. In the ‘Labs’ section of GWT you will find a ‘Site Performance’ option.
This page gives you an indication of your site speed and compares it to other websites. For example, for my own website www.jumpstartmarketing.ie we get the following read out:
“On average, pages in your site take 1.8 seconds to load (updated on Aug 5, 2010). This is faster than 73% of sites.”
GWT also makes suggestions to help you reduce the load time of your pages. If Google tells you how to improve your site then you are probably best off listening.
5. Geographic Target
If you have a .com TLD and you are solely targeting the Irish market then it would make sense for you to use a .ie TLD instead. Changing your domain name is not something that you should do without some serious contemplation of the consequences, as it can effect your rankings and branding efforts negatively. For those website that have a .com and only want to target Ireland then GWT will allow you to associate your .com website with a geographical target. This is ideal.
Most people use local search engines when searching e.g. Google.ie (not Google.com). On these local search engines the TLD is a ranking factor. Google places more relevancy on sites that are associated with that country as they presume .ie domains would be more relevant to people searching on a .ie search engine. Setting the geographic target on GWT will allow you to compete better on local search engine rankings.
