The internet alphabet starts with G for Google. Pretty much the same way as the English alphabet starts with E for English. No, it is A for Apple… I’m tremendously sorry, I forgot. But, every Apple starts with I, except for the Macbook which starts with M. But nothing starts with a Macbook… unless you haven’t slept… or your store manager made you work all night… or if you lost your pillow. Macbooks make a very uncomfortable pillow, and they buzz a bit – just a few tips from experience. The point is, everything is confusing and you don’t know what starts with what, but everything starts at Google… no not Google, Google’s search engine. Yeah, I think I got that right.

So, if it does start there, and you want your presence to be noticed, you need to be on Google. No not Google, Google’s search engine. Webmasters (people who design, make and manage websites) have always been interested in the way Google’s search engine views their websites. And they are all very happy with Google’s Webmaster Tools API. Cue: Toothy, coffee-stained grin.

Google’s Webmaster Tools help you provide all the equipment and information you need to know how its search engine works.

• Google Account: To begin using Webmaster Tools you first need to have a Google account, which you should or you’ve been homeless all the time. Then, you can start accessing this handy garage at Google Site Maps and entering the URLs.

• Verify Ownership: First, you’ll have to verify you own the car you’ve brought… uh, I mean website. This can be done in multiple ways like uploading a blank HTML file or by pasting a META tag in your homepage’s Head. This is for Google, not their engine, to make sure that you are the owner of the website.

• Access Profile: Now that your website ownership has been verified, you may access the profile of your webpage. The first page that opens is the overview screen and it shows most of the information and displays links to the various tools in the garage.

Google Website Analysis Tools:

• Diagnostic: The first tool is the Diagnostic tool. This tool points out any errors that Googlebot (the software used by Google to crawl websites) may have experienced while crawling your website. It will also include pages excluded from the robot.txt files. The robot.txt file points out to a spider which pages it is allowed to visit and which it isn’t, unless it wants to be stomped on. A spider is a general term for crawling software. These reports are helpful for webmasters as they can then remove any errors so Google searches are faster and smoother in the future.

• Reports: Then there are tools which help you by giving out useful statistical reports.
  1. One report is the Top Search Queries. This will show you how people are getting to your site. It will show the position where your page is displayed in the results. This will give you an idea of where the traffic on your website is coming from and will help you focus more on pages that generate most traffic.
  2. The Googlebot report also helps in this. It will tell you the keywords in your website, anchor text, inbound links and a density ordered content of your website.
  3. Next is the Crawl stat report. This is less of an actual crawling report and more of a Page Rank value. Though results seem discouraging (which they should, I mean come on you are not the only one on the web!) but they are in fact useful. You see, crawling outputs are updated monthly and so you can use them to measure how fruitful singular link building campaigns have been.
  4. The Index stats give you a report according to the operators on Google, like site, link, info, related Et cetera.

• Subscriber stats help you if you use Google’s feed management systems. This tool isn’t exactly bad, but its still of a newbie and needs a bit of coaching.

• Links Tool: The Links Tool will help you determine internal and external links popularity. This is really handy if you want to force popularity of specific areas of your website or if you want to lead the link popularity over time.

• Google Sitemaps: Then there is what was the most important of them all: Google Sitemaps. It was around this tool that all of the Webmaster Tools Project was built. Here you can deal with the XML sitemaps of your site, which basically guide Google about the content on your website.

• Tools: And weirdly, then there is Tools. No I am not joking here, it is Tools. This is where you’ll find Webmaster Tools’ tools, this is where you’ll get the most from Webmaster Tools. It is only confusing up till the time you actually see it for yourself. You’ll know what I mean.

• Robot Text file: If you are not familiar with the file Robot.txt, though I did touch it briefly, it is a protocol for spiders, in this case Googlebot, to find instructions of which content they can visit and index on you site. Let’s say you prefer that images may not be indexed, or you prefer that some areas of your site are not public then you can use this file to instruct spiders not to do so. This tool also helps you to ascertain if what you’ve written in robot.txt is valid. Sometimes, a small change can cause search engines to drop huge sections of your website, so use this tool every time you make changes to make sure there are no such ruts.

• Manage Site Verification: The “Manage Site Verification” part is there so you can alter the method in which your website was verified. This also enables you to protect your site, if you prefer it to be so.  This means that if you were previously with some other SEO provider, and then you decide to switch, Google watches your back to see if the other party still has access to your information. Google will send you a report if others apart from yourself have access.

• Set Crawl Rate: Webmaster Tools also enable you to set the crawl rate of your website, which is a rare option. However, the section will give you an overview of Googlebot’s activity on your website. Many people view this and think it is useless. But aha! No, it isn’t. You see when you launch new content or when you begin a new link campaign, these events will cause a spike in the graph. Now, these spikes are important, so review them regularly. Through them, you can measure how responsive Google is by determining how they correspond to your efforts. The point is to get Google to visit more often, request more pages and interact more with you. This way you can get your content indexed and ranked very quickly in the future.

• Set Preferred Domain: It is helpful if you are tired of seeing domain.com in your results. This tool allows you to instruct Google to display links according to your preference. However, if it doesn’t bother you, well leave it.

• Enable Enhanced Images: If you would like to appear in Google Images searches, the Enable Enhanced Image Search is there for you. But be cautious, this is a bit of a game from Google and many people have had a bad experience with it. Some have lost a lot of traffic too. The tool basically allows you to label images in your domain, but the labeler tool has something to do with points, which is a bit, well… it shouldn’t be that way. Maybe, there is something associated with it that may come later on, so you better stay on the safe side. Or else, well gamble and sleep begin your day with a Macbook under your head.

• Remove URL Tool: This last tool helps you remove URLs that may be causing problems with your search appearance. For example, you can resolve issues like having had your web analytics indexed. Common problems like those. Using the tool, you can remove these URLs from the index and then edit your robot.txt files as necessary.

So there you go. Google Webmaster tools summarized. And, hopefully, it will lift you from any woeful snags you’ve been in while trying to improve search rankings. Yes, I know everyone likes their page to be the one that begins people’s days… but Google always leads… UH! I mean their search engine (darn!).

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