Google Webmaster Tools is for everyone who wants to be found in Google

In the previous blog, Google Webmaster Tools: register and solve problems, we looked at how you can keep your website up and running for Google. Now the fun part: how are you better found it? Google Webmaster Tools offers unprecedented opportunities for SEO. Such as the keywords on which your pages are found. And per top page which keywords gave the most traffic. I specifically discuss the component Fetchen like Google under the Crawl menu item, and on the menu items Appearance of Site Search, Google Index and Search traffic.

Fetchen like Google

You have just written a great blog or launched a great product page. How quickly does Google see this? There may be a few days, depending on the crawl budget that Googlebot grants your site. Via Fetchen like Google you can directly enter your page for indexation.

It takes a few minutes for the page to be retrieved and displayed. Until that time, Google gives the page the status pending, in the Fetchen as Google overview. Then you get the option: Submit to Index. You get the choice: only crawl this URL or Crawl this URL and the associated direct links. Unless you have added internal links, I recommend submitting only the specified URL. You can do fetches like Google 500 x per month for this URL only, and 10x per month for this URL and associated links. It is especially useful if you also want to post your content on other sites, and you want to prevent Google from seeing your page as duplicate content.

Appearance of Site Search

How are your webb pages displayed in Google's search results? Google shows in this section Structured data, Highlight data, HTML improvements and Site links.

Structured data

Google is smart, but often needs help. "Paris Hilton" can be about the Paris hotel or the young heiress of the hotel chain. Google gets a lot out of context, but you can also help by offering your data in a structured way. With this you can also be better shown in Google via so-called 'rich snippets', such as telephone numbers, titles, addresses. The point is that Google also identifies the 10 numbers as a telephone number and not as a product number, for example. Under Structured data, Google indicates which data is still missing.

Click on one Page URL to get further feedback:

click on Live data to test for even more information:

Tips Structured data:

• Are your titles and descriptions correct? In the screenshot above, meta-description appears not filled, then you see the message “The excerpt of the page is displayed here. We cannot display text from your webpage because the text depends on the search query that the user enters.”Now this is a company blog page about Bloeise itself, which does not necessarily have to be found.
• In my case you see the message "Error: Missing required hCard" author "." Unfortunately Google Authorship declared dead, but it can still have an impact on mine Author Rank.
• Several types of formatting are possible: microformats, schema.org, microdata and RDFa.
• View Google's Rich Snippets not Appearing.

Highlight data

If you provide data in a structured way, any search engine crawler can read it. With Mark data you can mark data manually. First you specify which page it is and what the page is:

You can then select content from your web page (left mouse button), and then tag it in a menu on the right. You can then easily process similar pages. While this is of course fun for Google, I recommend that you simply offer your data in a structured way.

HTML improvements

A super handy tool from Google: what does Google stand out in the HTML of your website? For each possible report you immediately see which pages are involved and you can get started in your CMS.

Site links

When your homepage or webpage is displayed in Google, there are sometimes extra links below. These are links that Google thinks are relevant and help the Google user to reach their goal faster.

For my page the site links are: Guest Blogging, About Bloeise, Contact Information and Blooming with a sharp pen. You have no say in which links are shown as site links, and it can change regularly. However, you have the option of using Google Webmaster Tools which pages you do not want to see displayed as a site link.

Indexing status

On to Google index: how many pages has Googlebot been able to index? Problems with robots.txt can be seen here: if there is a new site for example disallow: / still stands. (some web builders use this to not show the new site to Google, but forget to remove it) In that case you see a huge drop to zero indexed pages. With the tab Advanced you see something more: which pages are blocked by robots.txt.

Content keywords

Not very useful, but for completeness: which keywords does Google link to your site? This list only shows the words found on your site. This is how Bloeise is the most common. If you click on a keyword, you will see the pages where the keyword is found.

Delete URLs

Only use if you want to quickly remove a URL from Google. Have you accidentally published a page that should not have been visible? And can it be found in Google? Then you can do this here straight away remove from Google, for 90 days. In the long term you have to fix this with robots.txt. Removing URLs is therefore primarily a fast method. You can use this to remove URLs, files and entire directories, even the entire website.

Search traffic

Finally the really interesting part: search traffic! Consisting of Searches, Top Pages, Links to Your Site, Internal Links, Manual Actions and International Targeting.

Searches

Since September 2013, most searches are protected by Google users. As a result, you can hardly see in Google Analytics which keywords Google users have used to find your site. This problem is called Keyword not provided by secure search. However, Google Webmaster Tools allows well see on which keywords your site is displayed and clicked. See screenshot:

Keyword Tips:

• The date can be reset to approximately 83 days.
• click on impressions, number of clicks, CTR or average position to organize the table on it.
• You CTR (click through ratio) stands for the number of times a visitor clicks after your website is displayed in Google. The higher the better. It should be high for your company name. (this is quite low for my site). Average position indicates the average position in Google. For example, I stand for 'website analysis' at 11, so that is the 2nd page. The higher the average position, the higher your CTR should be.
• Is your website displayed a lot and does it have a high average position, but is there not much clicked on? Click on the keyword and you will see which pages Google shows. pay attention: what you are going to do is the meta description edit those pages and process the keyword better. The keyword does not appear enough in your metadescription to stimulate the Google visitor to click on it. Through Top pages (see next heading) you can also look per page which keywords give traffic. This way you can process multiple keywords in the metadescription and in the title of the page.
• You can do this keyword list to download and enter in the keyword planner: this is how you learn how much traffic there is per keyword.

Top pages

Which pages of your website score well? These are top pages that you will find under the Top pages tab. See example:

The page / More-organic-range-on-Facebook-5-tips / is unfolded, and all keywords that provide views and clicks are below it. This allows me to further optimize the page for Google by better processing those specific keywords in titles, headings, texts, alt-image, meta-description and link-anchors.

Links to your site

Which domains link to your site? NO, unfortunately this is not a complete overview. It also doesn't really coincide with the search link: www.mijnwebsite.nl, and while you do see: most links to your site, your content with the most links and how your data is linked (anchors), this data is not linked to each other. They are 3 different tables.

• Most links to your site: You can see the number of links and pages with links per domain. There is no distinction between 'dofollow' and 'nofollow', so you can also see Flickr.com among them.
• Your content with the most links: which pages get which links? Click on a page to see the backlinks. Do you see links that you doubt or pass on value to? Record this!
• How your data is linked: an important one, because this says something about your backlink profile. Are there few links on your company name and very many on nice keywords? Then you run the risk of being put away by Google's Penguin Update as a bad website. That is not a sliding scale: whether you are satisfied or not. If you do not meet your expectations, you will notice a real decline in your Google rankings.

Internal links

Here you can see which pages link to each page. Remember that internal links are just as valuable as external links. And of course you have full control over the anchoring texts of your internal links.

Manual Actions

If all goes well, you will see the message: "No manual web spam actions found." You can't do anything else. You may even ask yourself: why is this not listed under Site Messages. If your site does not meet the quality guidelines of Google, then an automatic response can occur, or a manual web spam campaign. You will immediately see why Google did that. Reply fix this immediately, solve the problem and then send a new one Request for review to.

International targeting

A .nl domain focuses on the Netherlands. A .be domain focuses on Belgium. A .com or .org domain can focus on 1 country, a language area or multiple countries. You can set that here. And that is more important than you think. You can read this on the Bloeise.nl domain. I used to use bloeise.nl, the full company name as an url. I do not think so? Next, Google believes that I am focusing on the Swedish market. And so I score very well for the Dutch keywords entered in Sweden in Google, but not for the Dutch keywords entered in the Netherlands. That cannot be further specified by Google. This is only possible with a general domain name such as .com.

If you do not manage a Dutch site with a .NL domain, but you focus on multiple countries or language areas, then I recommend that you read Google's explanation: Multi regional and multilingual sites.

Google Webmaster Tools menu

At the top right you have a menu for several options that I only briefly mention:

• Preferences for Webmaster Help Programs: set the message language (English, Dutch) and the e-mail notifications. Leave the e-mail notifications on: that's how you get Site messages.
• Site Settings: explained earlier in Google Webmaster Tools: register and solve problems, set the preferred domain here. You can also adjust the crawl speed, but leave it at the recommended speed Let Google optimize for my site stand.
• Address change: step-by-step plan for when your website moves.

• Enable Webmaster Tools data in Google Analytics: with this you link GWT to Google Analytics. Unfortunately, you do not bring that much insight, I have not set up myself.

• Users and site owners: I'll explain with a screenshot:

This allows you to add an additional user, such as a colleague. This is useful if you want to give someone access to your site in GWT. You can give a user limited or full rights. You can also add a new owner who has full rights. For example, would you like to give your web builder access to solve a problem? You do that via Partners.

This is the third blog in a series about the Basic knowledge of Online Marketing