Sunday, November 28, 2010

5 Reasons You Should Be Using Google Webmaster Tools More Than You Do

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5 Reasons You Should Be Using Google Webmaster Tools More Than You Do
Google has offered an array of free tools to users and Webmasters in order to improve their user’s experience and the relevance of their search results. One such tool is Google Webmaster Tools.  
Most Webmasters never look in their account until they experience a problem. This is a mistake because there is valuable information on your site’s performance that can help you improve your reach.

#1 Find low hanging fruit

Webmaster tools provides a summary of search queries. All though this is a small amount of data, it is possible to find queries for which you have received impressions, but no clicks. And since there are no clicks, it does not show up in Analytics.
Go to “Your site on the web -> Search Queries” to access this information.
You will be given a graph and columns similar to Google Analytics. Look for words that are not on the first page, i.e. position “32″ and start looking at ways to improve their position.
**See Dave’s point in the comment about click through rates.

#2 Monitoring speed

All though I look tools like pingdom to test my site’s speed, Google actually provides a graph so you can check your progress over time. This is unusual for Google since they do not like to reveal to much information about how they grade sites.
Since Google has incorporated speed as a ranking factor, it is important to see how Google thinks your site performs. According to Cutts, they will not penalize a site for being slow, just reward a site for being fast. But, if your site is slow and your competitor is fast it has the same effect.
Go to “Labs -> Site Performance”:
Google Speed Test
As you can see, one of my sites is performing poorly. No wonder, because it is a Magento site, which I no longer recommend btw.
This graph has prompted me to move the site to a new host that specializes in hosting Magento. Hopefully, we will see an increase in speed on this graph soon.

#3 Identifying Indexation Rates

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