The benefits of using Google Webmaster Tools and why you should use it

Google Webmaster tools is an extremely valuable and easy tool to use. Webmaster tools has many benefits, a few of which I’ll explain below. If you’re not already using Google Webmaster tools then take a short amount of time out of your day, set it up and you’ll be glad you did.

• Sitemaps – Sitemaps is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a map of the pages (URL’s) that are in your site. It helps Google find pages that it may not otherwise would have found. There are many sitemap generators available, here’s a list provided by Google, but my recommendation would be to use XML-Sitemaps.com. If you have a smaller site, then simply using their free generator will work. If need to exclude pages or sections of your site, or you have a large site, then they also offer a paid version for a very reasonable price.

• Your site on the Web – This helpful section of Google Webmaster tools shows you things like search queries that drive traffic to your site, links to your site and the anchor text that is most commonly used, the most common keywords found on your site, internal links and subscriber stats.

• Diagnostics – The diagnostics section of Google’s webmaster tools is the most important part of the tools in my opinion. It will show you if any malware was detected on your site, the crawl errors Google encountered such as 404 errors and where the error came from, crawl stats, and the HTML suggestions which shows things like duplicate tags, descriptions and non-indexable content.

Google webmaster tools is free to use. It’s easy to set up. Use it in combination with Google analytics and you’ll have a wealth of information and statistics to help you grow and maintain a healthy website.

After you’ve set up and analyzed everything in Google webmaster tools and Google Analytics, head over the Bing and sign up for Bing’s Webmaster tools. Bing offer basically the same type of setup. With the popularity of Bing growing, now is the time to make sure your site is site up properly at Bing.