A Must Use: Google Webmaster Tools

Given that Google controls around 80% of the search market, whenever they create a tool to help you rank better, you should use it!

Google Webmaster Tools offers just that. Creating an account there is completely free, and you can do that on Google.com/webmasters/tools.

Once your account is active you’ll need to add your site and verify it by placing a string on the HTML head section (they will provide instructions, so just follow along).

The first thing you want to do after verifying your site is to click on “Site Configuration” and then “Settings“. There you’ll be able set your “Preferred Domain”. This important to make sure that Google will index only one version of your site (either the one with the www. prefix, or the one without it). There is no best choice here; it is a matter of preference. Just make sure that the version you’ll choose is actually working on your site, and not redirecting to another version.

At this point Google won’t have much data about your site, so you can leave it there. After a couple of weeks you should login again, and then explore the other features.

The most important section you should pay attention to is the “Crawl Errors” one, under the “Diagnostics” link. This basically will tell you if Google is facing any problems while crawling your site. If it is, you should try to fix the issue immediately, or your search rankings could suffer.

Not all errors are equally serious. The “Not Found” ones, for example, might just be site owners that linked to the wrong URL inside your site. Similarly, “Restricted by robots.txt” errors can be caused by disallowing crawling of certain areas on your site legitimately. Be careful with the “Timed out” and “Unrecheable” errors, though, because they mean that the Google bot is not reaching your pages correctly. If you get too many of these errors your complete site might get de-indexed.

After exploring the “Crawl Errors” section you should take a look at “Crawl stats” and “HTML suggestions“, both under the “Diagnostics” link.

“Crawl stats” will show you how often the Google bot is visiting your site. The graph should be stable, if not growing. If you see a downward trend there is something wrong there. Remember that the more often the Google bot visits your site the higher your authority for Google.

The “HTML suggestions” part will report problems with your meta tags. A very common problem webmasters have is a large number of duplicate title tags. If you have, take a look at your blog structure to solve the problem.

That is about it. There are other interesting sections inside the Google Webmaster Tools, but the ones I mentioned above are directly related to the performance of your site inside Google, so you should keep an eye on them regularly (i.e., at least once a month).

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