Incorporating Google Webmaster Tools into your website can give you several benefits; both through Google search engine optimization as well as organizing and monitoring your website. This article covers Webmaster Tools as well as their functions within a site or blog.
Webmaster Tools is Google
It is obvious that Google has become top dog when it comes to search engines. Not only do the majority of people use Google for searches, but for Gmail, Google Images, and other Google services as well. Taking into consideration that many website visitors reach websites through Google, optimizing a site for Google should be of priority. This is where Webmaster Tools comes in handy. Webmaster Tools is a free service offered by Google, that allows webmasters to tweak their websites to function better with Google.
Google Bot
If you have ever wondered how Google finds new pages and adds them into search engine results, this is mainly done through Googlebot. Googlebot automatically scans websites that are indexed in Google, and updates them. Whenever you add a new page or blog post to your website, Googlebot will scan it and eventually add it into Google search results. Webmaster tools allows you to customize how Googlebot works with your website. For example, if you do not want your website to show up in a Google search at all, you can exclude Googlebot from your site all together. This will stop new pages and blog posts from ever entering Google's search engine.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps is another feature of Google Webmaster Tools. You may already have a sitemap directly on your website or blog. However, this is a very general type of sitemap aimed at helping all search engines, as well as visitors. You can create another sitemap directly through Webmaster Tools. In doing so, the new sitemap will be submitted directly to Google, already optimized for Google to use. This can bring many benefits such as faster indexing, more elaborate indexing, etc...
Site Monitoring
Site monitoring through Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to view numerous statistics about your website or blog. Current options are:
Top search queries - top search queries will show you the search terms that web surfers typed into Google to find your website or blog. This information can be of great benefit to you, as it will allow you to optimize titles and meta information. By doing so, your blog or website will appear under certain search terms in the future.
Links to your website - every webmaster knows that sites linking to your website will greatly improve SEO. Google Webmaster Tools makes monitoring backlinks a snap.By keeping track of the authority and number of sites linking to your site, you can improve search engine optimization.
Subscriber Stats - Google Webmaster Tools allows you to directly view the number of subscribers to your website or blog.