How to use Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

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HTML Improvements• You will find this report under Search Appearance• It provides list of issues with your site’s meta descriptions and

title tags, and any content not indexable.

Content Keywords

• Under Google Index > Content Keywords• Shows keywords used on your site, with

keyword variations and significance.• The pages where these keywords appear• Tells you if you need more content for your

target keywords and themes (important after Hummingbird release)

• This report lists who has linked to you : top linking domains and linking URLs, anchor text and top linked pages of your site

• If you have over 40% anchor text with keywords or too many links from spam or irrelevant, you will get hit by algorithmic or manual penalty

• Use this report to do a link audit and get rid of bad links

Links to your site

• You should submit at least basic XML sitemap• Check here to make sure your sitemap is submitted and there

are no errors.• You can also submit an image sitemap, news sitemap, video

sitemap or mobile sitemap.

Sitemaps

• In the Search Queries section, click the "With Change" button. This your current statistics as well as looking at your change in performance over time.

Search Queries

• Query: Tells you what keywords your site is currently ranked for

• Impressions: how many times your site appeared for a specific keyword search

• Clicks: how many people are clicking on your site in search results?

• Average Position: This you where your site ranks for each keyword averaged across the time period, all countries, all devices, etc. After Google started encrypting search results and hiding referring keywords, this is the only reliable keyword data you get

• You need to be aware that GWT only shows data for approx. 2,000 queries which returned your site in search results > this is only a sub-set of total data set, hence the Clicks, Average Position and CTR are skewed

• In the search queries section, click on a search term. It shows which pages are ranking for that keyword

• It tells you if your website content is effectively targeting your selected terms.

• Tell you what keywords each page of your content ranks for > helps validate targeted keywords and discover new ones, where you may need more work

Drill Into Individual Keywords

Structured Data

• If you have structured data in your site, see this report under Search Appearance > Structured Data

• Report shows the type of structured data that Google was able to detect, along with the URLs containing each type

• It also lists items with errors

Structured data

Data Markup Highlighter

• Does your site have articles, local businesses, products, events, restaurants?

• Use structured data mark-up to help Google understand these entities

• If you do not know how to add structured data mark-up, Data Highlighter tool makes it easy to publish entities to Google without adding code to your site

• With Data Highlighter, you simply "tag" each data field with your mouse and then ‘publish it’

Structure Data Markup Errors Report

• New upgrade to Structured Data dashboard shows items with errors • This helps you to debug issues with your structured data markup.

Smartphone Specific Crawl Errors• This new feature crawl errors specific to smart phone

devices. The Smartphone errors tab can be accessed in the crawl errors report

• Report lists server errors, Not found errors and soft 404, Faulty redirects (e.g., when all pages on the desktop site redirect smartphone users to the homepage of the smartphone-optimized site.) and blocked URLs

• Why is it important to have a mobile-optimized website and fix any configuration errors?

• In June 2013, Google announced ranking changes for search results on smart phones. SERP rankings will suffer for sites that are mis-configured for smart phone users, or do not have a mobile-optimized website.