Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be complicated when you don’t know the right way to use this feature for directing traffic to your website. There are many tools available, yet considering Google is the search engine used more frequently, the information will be regarding the aspects of the tools used within Google.

The benefit of using Google Webmaster Tools helps website owners the in the ability to generate larger amounts of traffic to their website. Google Webmaster Tools is a free service for internet users. There is an extremely large amount of information available to you after you have verified your website with Google.

Here are some of the features of Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools will show you all the errors on your site, which this process includes showing any broken links on the website and all the links driving the internet traffic to the website where there might not be a valid page. The tools also include telling the site owner of possible restrictions they may have placed on the site that will limit access to the site visitors.

There is the ability to set the geographic target of the site such as if you want the www. to appear on the listing of the site. You can select if you want to show images within Google when the search has been performed by internet users. This process is called Google Image Labeler.

Google Webmaster Tools will provide a list of URLs that have duplicate title tags or meta description. The information will let you know if the pages are too short or too long. This helps to correct any problems with the website and lowers the traffic flow.

Top search queries are shown with the Google Webmaster Tools. It provides information regarding what the webs searches are and how the internet users are seeking information on the internet. This information helps to increase the flow of traffic to the website. The provided information breaks down the results by web, image and country.

Managing the site links for your website is very important. Most people desire to have additional information listed in the search results with their website. Google Webmaster Tools provide the option of setting the information you want listed under your website in the search results. You can only let Google know if you don’t want a site link listed, and you are not able to tell them what pages to add.

Google will provide a bit of JavaScript about your site on a 404 error page that will offer your site as an option for the internet user seeking certain information. This is a great way to direct traffic to your site.

Using Google Webmaster Tools helps to promote higher traffic flow to your website. It is a free service you cannot afford to pass up when wanting to generate higher hits on your website.

When you set up your blog or website it is incredibly foolish not to register your site with Google Webmaster tools. It provides you with  a lot of valuable information about your site such as the number of backlinks to your various posts/pages.

It also tells you about problem pages for the Google robot as to which pages could not be found, what is restricted by robots text and so on. But recently I found a very useful trick that I have been employing to very good effect.

If you look at the top left of the page for analysis of a particular site you will see a table of “top search queries”. Unlike the stats in your Awstats program in cPanel, these queries show the key phrases and their ranking or position according to the Google robot.

The first important point about this is that you will see that your site might be found or ranked for a search term that you had not targeted. This affords you the opportunity to provide content based around that particular term, which will obviously be mentioned somewhere on your site but not focussed on, to boost your rankings and rank for that particular key phrase.

It is incredible to study this table and see phrases or keywords on your site which were written naturally into a post or page and to see them ranking in the top 20 in Google. Now the trick to which I referred above is as follows:
Click on the “more” link at the bottom of this “top searches queries” table and this will expand the list to maybe 20 key words.

Scan through this list and see what phrases are ranking on page 2 of Google, in other words are top 20, and then check out the number of searches for that keyword. Make sure that there is a decent number of searches for that phrase but once you are satisfied that there is, write a post/page based around that key phrase and write some articles targeting that post.

Without too much effort you should be able to nudge your position from page 2 of Google to page 1..all for a word that you may never have considered or targeted.
Next time, check your webmaster account and check out that table because you would not know what little gem you will find.

And remember you are not trying to get a keyword from page 15 or 20 onto page 1; you only need to shove it from page 2 which should be very realisable with a little bit of judicious article marketing.

I came across a strange problem while I was reviewing webmaster tools. I signed in with my google account and started reviewing my settings. I chose the website I validated before and clicked Site configuration>Crawler access respectively.

In the Test robots.txt tab, I saw interesting errors that was saying:

Line1:  ?User-agent: *              Syntax not understood
Line2:  Sitemap: Valid Sitemap reference detected
Line3:                                        No user-agent specified

I checked my robots.txt file again and again. There was no question mark in Line1 of the robots.txt file which google claims there is.

I create a new robots.txt file by using notepad in Vista Home Premium operating system and uploaded this new file into my production server. I waited for about a day and checked again. The same error was still there.

I Googled for this and found a link which was talking about exactly the same issue I was having. After creating my new robots.txt file by using ANSI encoding type and checking it from this link problem solved. Well at least seems like that. I have been checking Google and it is still showing me the same error. I think it is going to take some time to reflect new changes.

This is the link I found the solution for this specific problem: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=28d012e70d5fcdc8&hl=en

This is the link of the web site which gave me the opportunity to check my robots.txt file: http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/cgi-bin/check-url.pl

You can find the related blog entry in the following link as well. http://www.yasarmurat.com/Blog/19/syntax-not-understood-error-for-robots-txt-file-in-google-webmaster-tools.aspx

Have a great day.

-Update:

After waiting some time the change happened as it is expected.

There are many advantages to the “Webmaster Tools” offered by Google, Yahoo! and Bing.  While on first glance it may not seem as helpful as web analytics, these tools give web designers valuable information on how these search engines view your site and any errors there are on it.  They do not however give you any information on your users or traffic as analytics do.

To setup an account with webmaster tools you will first need to visit the site and enter the URL of your website.  You will then be asked to verify your site by either uploading a specific file or entering some meta information in the head area of the homepage.

Once verified you can upload a sitemap in a text or XML format.  Either is fine and will allow you to tell the engines what pages exist on your site to spider.  It can take some time for the engines to download these sitemaps and follow the links but it’s worth the wait.  It’s also worth adding a “robots.txt” file in the root of the site, telling the search engines which pages not to index.

Once this has been done you can then gain valuable information on what these engines see in your site.  Some of the most useful things are the number of links to your site and the pages that are being linked to, key words and phrases that your site is being listed for and clicked through to and any errors that there may be in the site, such as dead links.

Google places significant importance on links to your site so it is wise to monitor these links and continue to gain links to your site from other legitimate sites on the web.  Webmaster tools will also report the internal links you have within your site.

Perhaps most significantly of all, you can study the keywords and phrases that your site is being indexed and listed for in search results, known as an impression and the click through rate for these impressions.  You will be able to see firstly if these keywords and phrases are relevant to you and the rankings currently attained.  This serves as a good basis to start your search engine optimisation campaign as you can target keywords and phrases that you are not listed for or improve rankings that you are listed for.

Lastly, any errors within the site will be reported here such as pages that can not be found, meta tags that have been duplicated or missing or that are perhaps not descriptive enough.  You can review this information and tweak the meta information on your pages so it’s more relevant and descriptive If necessary.

Web designers gain a huge amount of information from these tools which once understood can benefit website rankings hugely.

Add A Site Map – One of the first things you should do is create an XML Sitemap and add this to your webmasters account. Simply click onto the Sitemaps link and click Submit a Sitemap. Simple enter in the extension of where the sitemap sits and its name and submit this. Try to make sure the sitemap is on the root of the server / site as this makes accessibility a bit easier and also gives you more control.

Set Your Crawl Rate – If you have quite a few new pages you would like to get seen and possibly indexed by Google, you can set the crawl rate to be at the highest possible. The crawl rate is how often the Googlebot comes to your site and how many requests it makes per second, once it’s on there. If you have a decent web host, set this to the highest, especially if you are a new site as the more requests you can handle, the more likely it is to get the pages indexed quicker, although there is no guarantee of this.

Choose Preferred Domain – The age old debate about whether Google sees www.clearwebservices.com and clearwebservices.com as two different websites continues and will continue for many more years. The way we see it is, if you don’t use the www, like we do not, tell Google you do not use it. You can simply select whether it should see the www or not and even if this is not massively beneficial, it doesn’t hurt to make sure the way your site is seen and indexed by Google is the best it can be.

Define Geographic Target – If your site targets visitors in a particular location, you can provide Google with the information that will help determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improve the Google search results for geographic and location specific queries. This is great if you only sell products to the UK, it means you can tell Google to try and only send your UK Traffic, which is of course more relevant for your website.

Fix Crawl Errors – Although you will never be penalised for submitting a sitemap, with errors or without out, it is vital to pay attention to any errors Google is telling you about, and of course also fix them. The fewer errors you have, the better, so make sure you keep any eye on the crawl errors section periodically and fix any issues that are reported.

The Google Webmasters tool has really been developed to make sure your site is as good as is possibly can be for Google, and we think this is a great thing. But, you have to make sure you use the tool for more than just checking your rankings and links back, and by implementing a few of the above tips, will hopefully make sure your site is indexed in the most efficient way.

There are any number of different webmaster tools, software and scripts available on the internet today, ranging from the very useful to those that you simply can’t work out what they do.  But the best webmaster tools allow for a huge amount of flexibility, functionality and ‘stickiness’ to be added to your website.

Whilst the question ‘what can they do for me’ is a fair question, it is also a very broad one that is difficult to answer – what can’t they do for you?  But let us try break the question down for you, so that you can understand the power of certain types of webmaster tools and just how they can improve your own website.

Traffic

Firstly webmaster tools can be used to increase traffic to your site by a number of different methods.  Tools can be bought that helps you bring in content from RSS feeds – meaning your page is constantly updating, which is something that search engines such as Google love – allowing for much more by way of organic search traffic.

They can allow for better organization of keywords, tagging, categories etc.  They can ‘ping’ different portals and search engines for you.  They can post your updated pages onto different forums and social media sites.  The right webmaster tools can bring in a lot of traffic, and of course an increase in traffic often means an increase in sales.

Stickiness and functionality

Of course traffic is all well and good, but you want that traffic to stay onsite and perform the actions you want them to – and ideally keep coming back for more.  Webmaster tools can help you there too.

Scripts are available that can translate your page into other languages – engaging users in the language that they want and increasing your audience exponentially.

You can buy scripts that allow comments to be easily added (whilst fighting off spam commenting) to the site, meaning people start feeling part of the ‘conversation’ of the site and come back for replies.

There are scripts available to easily add video, which has been proven to engage viewers far more readily than static sites do.

Other tools can bring your sign up form right in front of the visitor as a popup, or have it scroll across the screen inviting the viewer to sign up for a newsletter for freebie – dramatically increasing your conversion ratio.

Security

If you deal in digital products that are available for download, security can be a real issue.  People may well buy the product to get your link – and then pass it along to hundreds of other people who will also download, costing you a lot of money.  The right webmaster tool can stop this from happening.

As you can see there are a myriad of uses that webmaster tools can be put to, and we have only scratched the surface here.  If you are looking to add functionality, security and traffic and increase sales or sign ups on your website, make sure you are using the right webmaster tools.

Google webmaster tool consists of different software and scripts on the internet. These tools have wide range of functions such that some are very useful and others are can’t work out their functions at all. A website’s performance is greatly dependent on to improvement of webmaster tool. These tools are major factors in promoting or demoting a website.

TRAFFIC Webmaster tools are used to increase traffic to the website. There are different methods to increase popularity of the website through RSS feeds. RSS feeds decide that the website is regularly updated. This means that the search engines allow traffic to a website to make it popular amongst search engines. Organic search traffic is diverted towards website and converts into relevant customers through this process.

The search engines allow organization of keywords, tagging, and categories, etc for better traffic diversions. The spiders of the search engine can crawl over the web pages and post them on different forums and social media sites. This is sure that right webmaster tool is capable of bringing-in traffic, for better and quality traffic to a site.

FUNCTIONALITY A webmaster tool helps in diverting customers to a particular website to perform such functions which are relevant for the website and compel them to keep coming back over again due to the website’s capabilities and help through webmaster tools. Many a times, users are engaged to translate the webpage into the reader’s language to make it ideal for searching in search engines. Availability of scripts makes exponential increase in audience in different languages, reaching to diverse class of audiences.

Efforts are made to add video to convert the site from a static one to dynamic to create viewer’s interest. Static scripts are never interesting enough to create interest. Certain tools help in sign-up the newsletter for the freebie. Higher conversion ratio ascertains better and dynamic site in webmaster tool.

SECURITY Right webmaster tools always protect downloading of any kind secured data from other individuals. Security of pages is very essential. Some people get the link to a particular site and start downloading the data, and pass it on to other websites. Then the security of the website is at stake. Only webmaster tool can avoid such situation, thus saving on cost and increase returns.

The gist is that if a website holder is looking for a website that adds functionality, security and traffic and enhances sales, by using the right webmaster tools.

For more details on seo services and best seo company visit on www.mediamarketingonline.com

Google webmaster tool is the best tool for a websmaster to show his website to google as he can see in a mirror. Google will do a lot more as you think. Today I will tell you some benefits of google webmaster tools for search engine optimization purpose.

All information at glance Google will list all the pages on your site that it has indexed. Now this information is available elsewhere, but with Webmaster Tools, this plus other exclusive information, is available in one place. This is handy if you run a number of sites.In my opinion, if you are in the habits of making the websites for others than this will very useful for you.
Show everything about your website Google is an important index, using Webmaster Tools is a direct way to say to Google, my site exists, please add them to your index. Now you’ll can be sure, if all your pages are not indexed, If one of your webpage is not indexed that means that google does not know about this then try to increase your backlinks..
Sitemaps – Tell Google About All Your Pages If you have a big websites and your navigation for your website is very poor so that all the pages are not clearly shown on the pages. e.g. you have 250 pages and all of these can’t be shown in your navigation bar. Don’t worry about this issue because google bot will crawl all of your pages that are not clearly shown on other pages are still hidden.
Stop specific pages to be indexed. All most every website have some thank you pages, contact pages or order pages. These pages should not be indexed because search engine user will feel boring to see these because they don’t know that what this is. So, in your website’s sitemap you can restrict some page not to be indexed. Google will exclude these pages from its index.
Website errors I personally like this feature. Google will show errors list for your website that may occur during crawling your website. Google can show HTTP errors, Sitemap errors, not followed pages, not allowed pages, timed out pages, not reachable pages. I think this is very necessary to know these errors for a webmaster to be succeeded.
Backlinks Webmaster Tools will tell you precisely how many pages out there, link to your home page, and, separately from that, they’ll tell you how many pages out there link to other pages in your site. Now this is part of the data Google uses to determine the Page Rank of each of your pages.
Backlink Text You know it is important for SEO reasons to have links back to you contain relevant keyword terms. Well, it’s hard to influence that, but now at least you can see what people are using in their backlinks.
URL Removal You can use Webmaster Tools to remove a page from Google’s index that has already been indexed but that you now wish wasn’t.
Top Query Strings Webmaster Tools will tell you what people have been typing in to find your site over various different periods of time. It also shows you this information complete with exactly which position of Google’s search results your terms appeared on. You can also look at google.com results only, google.com.pk only and other location specific googles as well.
Image Search You can use Webmaster Tools to say, “Hey Google, index my images too”. If your site has great images you can use them to further enhance the visibility of your website. Set the enhanced image search up in Webmaster Tools and then, make sure you have full image descriptions (with relevant keywords) in the alt attribute of each image. For completeness, also add a title attribute so the user can see further information about the image if they want to. It all helps Google index you better.

Read Full article here  SEO Benefits of Google Webmaster Tools

As with trying to find a definition for a webmaster it can be next to impossible to find a definition for webmasters tools or software, simply because there are so many different types, all doing different things for the webmaster.

Essentially both are simply pieces of software that fulfill a function that the webmaster wants them to, whether it be adding function for users of the site or making life easier at the backend for the webmaster to control parts of the website.

There are a number of different types of webmaster tools and webmaster software that you should become familiar with.

Analytical Webmaster Tools

These set of tools are software that help track various visitors and actions on the site.  They can come in the form of scripts, software, plug in tools or pretty much anything you can imagine.  But the idea is that you are able to analyze how visitors come to your site and what it is they do there – allowing you to better decide what is working and what isn’t, and how to take things forward.

Content Webmaster Tools

There are a huge amount of different types of webmaster software that can be used to effect the content of websites.  They can vary from tools for easily adding videos to the website to tools for bringing in an RSS feed to constantly, and automatically, update content for you.

The idea behind such tools is to make the content easier to manage and present in an attractive manner, and to automate as much as possible.

Interactive Webmaster Tools

These tools are designed to allow the webmaster to let the visitors interact with the site – to move it from a passive site to a social or web 2.0 site.  This can dramatically increase the user experience, stickiness and repeat visits of site users.

Such tools include those that add the ability for users to add comment to web pages, a valuable tool that will allow users to feel part of the conversation, not simply dictated to.

SEO Webmaster Tools

This is software designed to help increase the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your site, to ensure that your website is always finishing high in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for the keywords that you are targeting.  Important because obviously the higher or site ranks in the search engines the more organic search traffic will be visiting the site.

Tools for improving SEO include such scripts as the ability to add a tag cloud to the site – increasing the interlinking and keyword saturation of your site, gaining it a higher position in the search engines.

It is important that you assess what it is that you want from your website so that you know which webmaster tools you need.  But now that you have an understanding as to what webmaster tools and webmaster software are – and can do for you, you are half way there.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a great way of telling Google what pages you want to be indexed.

Google will index your site regardless of using a sitemap, however, this tool makes it easier for Google to index those pages you want it to. You can exclude pages if you really want to, but you can use a generator to create the XML formatted file.

Here are some generators:
– DMXZone provide a Dreamweaver extension that will build a sitemap for you in the correct format – http://www.dmxzone.com/go?10538
– Google provide a long list here http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators
– Google talks about Sitemaps here – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318&hl=en

Content Analysis

One of the things Google hates is duplicate content, even worse is duplicate Titles and Descriptions (These are the important Meta Tags)

Webmaster Tools will allow you to see if there are any pages with duplicated titles or duplicated descriptions. This is a very important tool to get the most out of these tags

Web Crawl Diagnostic

Once Google has crawled (indexed) your website, you hope all of your pages are visible in the index. This tool can help you find out if Google had problems finding and pages.

Obviously, if Google can find a page, it wont be in the search engine listings.

This can be bad links, moved content or other easily picked up issues

External Links

This shows all of the links into your website from other pages on the internet.

The best thing is the link on the right hand side that allows you to see all of the inbound links.

(Note: this does not show all of the times your website is mentioned, only the working links people can click on to find you)

In basic search engine terms, the more inbound links the better for you

Geographic Targeting

This one is bit more advanced and will affect a smaller number of people. One of the key changes in Google’s delivery of search results is the pre filtering that is done when you search.

Google will filter your results, even if you don’t ask it to.

As an example, if you do a search for a topic and DO NOT select the “web pages from this country” button your results are still biased towards the country Google believes you are in.

Alternatively, if you select the “web pages from this country” button, you will get results that Google think are directed to that country.

How does it do this?

It shows results for either websites with a country specific suffix ie .nz for New Zealand, or websites that are hosted in that country.

However, if you have a .com website hosted not in New Zealand, you will not be found in the search results for that country specific search.

The solution is to use Google’s Geographic Target, where you can specifiy the county you want to target (Only one, though)

There are plenty of other Tools, including Keywords, Search Phrases etc.

So Webmaster tools is a must have for all Web Designers, but also for those business owners who are keen to see how their sites are performing in Google.