Use Webmaster Tool To Improve Your Search Presence

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Use Webmaster Tool To Improve Your Search Presence
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Google webmaster tools is perhaps one of the most
useful tools today for SEO. It is free, its
Google and it can give you a lot of information
about your website. If you are a website owner
and you are not using this tool, you are
certainly missing out a lot of features that can
make your SEO job easier and most effective.
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1 Ask Google To Notify You If There Is A
Problem With Your Website
Google developed webmaster tools so that they can
communicate more efficiently with webmasters.
Since one-to-one communication is impossible due
to the volume of webmasters, webmaster tools is
the medium to get information from Google about
your website.
In case there is a problem with your website
(server is down, hacked, affected with malware),
Google can notify you via email. In order to
receive these emails you have to enable email
notifications by selecting SETTINGS (that the
top right gear style icon) and then WEBMASTER
TOOLS PREFERENCES.
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2 Let Google Know About Your Target Audience
Suppose that you have a .com or .net domain but
your target audience is people searching Google
from the UK. You can use the SITE SETTINGS (its
under SETTINGS) in Webmaster tools to tell Google
about your target users by selecting TARGET USERS
IN and choosing United Kingdom as the destination.
The effect of such a setting is that your website
will perform better in Google.co.uk than
Google.com (of course a lot of other factors play
a role but the general idea is that Google will
give more preference to what you have set here).
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3 Set Your Preferred Domain
In the SITE SETTINGS screen you also configure
whether Google should use the www or the non-www
version of your domain (see screenshoot above).
In order to do that you need to have both domains
verified with your account.
What this means is that if you set the preferred
domain as the www.yourdomain.com, Google will
treat any links pointing to http//yourdomain.com
the same way as it treats www.yourdomain.com
links.
The setting you have here should be the same in
your website as well. If you are using WordPress
this is under SETTINGS gt GENERAL gt WORDPRESS
ADDRESS (URL)
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4 Identify Which Keywords Bring Google Traffic
To Your Website
Perhaps one of the most commonly used features of
webmaster tools, especially after Google removed
the keywords data from Google Analytics, is the
search Queries (you can find it under SEARCH
TRAFFIC on the left menu).
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5 Keep Track Of Incoming Links

• Knowing the number of links pointing to your
  website (homepage or internal pages) is necessary
  for many reasons
• You know which websites link to you
• You know which terms they use to link to you
• You know which pages from your website have
  more links
• In case there is sudden problem with incoming
  links you can use the DOWNLOAD LATEST
  LINKS to see which links may have caused
  the problem
• You can use the data to identify if you have
  any bad links that need to be removed

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6 Check If Your Website Is Under A Manual
Penalty
Google can impose two types of penalties to
websites. First is the manual penalty which means
that the Google quality team reviewed a website
and decided to impose a penalty. In such a cases
in order to get the penalty removed you need to
file a reconsideration request and someone from
Google will review the website again and decide
if the penalty is to be removed or not.
Under the MANUAL ACTIONS option Google will tell
you if a manual penalty is imposed on your
website. It is also worth noting that manual
actions have an expiry date so you may see the
penalty removed without filing a reconsideration
request but most probably it will come back again
if you dont take corrective actions.
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7 Check If The Google Crawler Can Access Your
Website Correctly
If Google cannot access or read your website
properly then this also minimizes your chances of
achieving good rankings. Under the CRAWL section
there are 2 really useful features to help you
ensure that there are no problems with crawling
Crawl Errors Use this report to find if you
have any broken links within your website or if
there are any links pointing to pages on your
website that do not exist.
Fetch as Google Want to know how Google sees
your website? Use the FETCH AND RENDER function
of fetch as Google to get an idea of how Google
renders your website and most importantly if
there are any blocked resources (javascript, css
etc) that prevent Google from having a complete
picture of how your website looks.
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8 Submit And Check Your Sitemap Status
An xml sitemap is a list of urls that you want
Google to take into account when crawling your
website. If you dont have a sitemap, Google can
still find out about the website and pages but a
sitemap among other things, makes their life
easier.
Under the SITEMAPS option you can check your
sitemap status and see any potential problems.
You can test and submit new sitemaps and also see
how many pages from your website are included in
the Google index.
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Contact US
Techno Infonet
FF-107, Abhishree Adroit, Nr. Swaminarayan
Mandir, Mansi Circle, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad -
380015 Gujarat, India. T. 91 79 40307527
Email - sales_at_technoinfonet.com
Web - http//www.technoinfonet.com