Google Webmaster Tools Setup

by Mike Nichols

Google Webmaster Tools is not as well-known as Google Analytics. But it is essential to maintaining the health of your website, and perhaps even more important, its Google search engine visibility. This article tells you how to set it up, then gives you an overview of what information is available for your site.

Adding Google Webmaster Tools to your site is an easy 5-step process that takes just minutes. Here’s how to do it:

Setting up Google Webmaster Tools

Step 1: Go to the Google Webmaster Tools home page. You will see an “Add a site…” button. Click on it.

Enter your site's URL

Step 2: Enter your site URL.

Verification screen

Step 3: The next screen verifies your website as being yours. Choose “meta tag” for the verification method. Copy the meta tag shown on the screen. This will go into the “Header Scripts” section of your Thesis Options page.

Put the meta tag into the Thesis Options header scripts area

Step 4: In another tab or screen in your browser, go to your site’s Admin page. Click on “Appearance,” then “Thesis Options.” In the left column, look for “Stats Software and Scripts.” Click on “Header Scripts.” Put the meta tag you copied in the verification screen into the box for header scripts. Click the big green button to save.

Step 5: Go back to the verification screen. Press the “Verify” button. If all goes well, the next screen you will see will be the Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard. You’re done!

The Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard

The Dashboard provides you with an overview of the health of your site and its visibility via the Google search engine. At a glance, you can see:

Top search queries (the top 10)
Crawl errors encountered by the Google bots
Links to your site (the top 10 plus the total of links)
Sitemaps names, the number of indexed URL’s and the last time it was used by the Google bots

Detailed reports are available from the left sidebar. Note that all reports are downloadable and include much more information than is shown on the screen.

Site configuration

Sitemaps – sitemap list, URL’s submitted and indexed, and the last time they were used by the Google bots. If you have no sitemaps, you can add them from this screen.
Crawler access – details of your robots.txt file and status
Sitelinks – to your site’s interior pages generated by Google
Change of address – tools to move your site to another domain
Settings – geographic target, preferred domain, and crawl rate

Your site on the web

Top search queries – with clickthrough. Lists top 100 search terms with percentage use and rank position, can download a report with all of them for 90 days
Links to your site – top 50, can download report with all of them
Keywords – found when Google bots were crawling site
Internal links
Subscriber stats

Diagnostics

Crawl errors – encountered by Google bots, including 404 pages
Crawl stats – Googlebot activity for the last 90 days
HTML suggestions – duplicate, long, short and missing meta descriptions, title tags, as well as non-indexable content

Help for Google Webmaster Tools

The information shown by Google Webmaster Tools is pretty obvious and does not require interpretation, as does Google Analytics. However, there is help available on the top right menu that will describe the problems Webmaster Tools found. Each sidebar item has its own help, as well. Googling “Google Webmaster Tools help” turns up many, many pages that will help you diagnose and correct problems reported by the Webmaster Tools.

I hope you decide to give Google Webmaster Tools a try. It can enhance your understanding of your site greatly.

What next?

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