Google Webmaster Tools – 3 quick tips to help your SEO campaign

Google has been adding more functionality to their Webmaster Tools in recent  years, allowing webmasters to get a better overall understanding of the current state of their site.

In this post I will be taking a look at some of the functionality I have used recently and why I feel it is useful from an SEO point of view, and what it all means..

Once you have logged into your Webmaster Tools account, you’ll see a list of the various functions down the left hand side. In this post I focus on 3key  functions I think can benefit an SEO campaign and why.

1. Crawl errors

Google now shows the total number of pages that they have crawled and subsequently found errors with. There are 4 variations of errors; 1. server errors, 2. denied access, 3. 404 error pages, and 4. ‘other’.

You can view and download the top 1,000 pages that have a particular error. In Natural Search often the number of broken pages is the most important so, in the example above, we see  a list of 1,000 of the 12,495 pages which are broken.

Google also list these 1,000 pages in order of ‘importance’, which is nice of them. If you click on any  URL  listed there is a ‘linked from’ tab which provides a list of pages that linking to the broken page – very useful.

2. Index Status

Google also allows webmasters to see the status of the total number of pages on their site being indexed by Google. This is useful in certain situations such as if you’re making large scale server changes to the site or migrating the site. You can use this information to ensure there is no drop off in the number of pages being crawled and indexed by Google.

3. Sitelinks

I have been using this feature regularly in recent weeks. It is important to ensure that the sitelinks being displayed are relevant and will attract clicks, so removing irrelevant site links can be very beneficial. Often Google will pull out what they feel is relevant or important to the user and display this as a sitelink, for example:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, Google occasionally pulls less relevant pages to be displayed as a site link. Below you can see an example for Honda:

It may be the case that users are searching for Lawn & Garden products from Honda, or more likely an example of a less relevant page being displayed as a site link which could be removed.

Rather than specifying which pages are displayed for a user as a site link, Webmasters can specify which pages are not displayed.

So if you ever notice that there is a page appearing in your site links that you do not want to be displayed on the results pages, you can just add it to this list to be demoted – nice!

Further posts around the features and functionality of Google Webmaster Tools to come soon!