Google webmaster tools was first announced in the year of 2005 (summer). Beginning from that date, it has been 6 years now, and maybe millions of web sites has been utilizing this service, and most them has started using it from the very beginning. But why do people care about this? The answer is quite simple, if you want to be indexed in a higher rank in Google, you have to care about what Google thinks about your site. Google webmaster tools is the Google way of telling the site owners about how they are doing. Webmaster tools offers some quite valuable information that no one else can do. Sitemap status, Search queries, Keywords, Internal links, External links,  Crawl errors, HTML suggestions and many more. If you are still not registered your site with Google webmaster tools, now go and do it. The rest of this article will help to readers who has been already using Google webmaster tools (at least for 2 months and more.)

Rather than demonstrating Google webmaster tools in this article, I would tell you how to use it to increase your traffic. I assume you are already familiar with it. First you have to know How successful you are with your objectives? I mean is your site really getting attention with keywords you want it to be? Or Are you successful in your niche? There is a quite simple way of checking this. First create a list of keywords you think your site is successful on them. It shouldn’t have to be a long list, just quickly pick 5-10 keywords or queries. Now, from the left menu click on “Your site on the web” > “Search queries”. Now you should be seeing a long list depending on your content. The most popular keyword is shown in the first row, the less popular ones follows it second, third and goes on. What do you think now? Does the list you have created match the actual list ? If it matches, and your impressions are decent, then you are successful and know what you are doing.

Generally, it is really hard to get ranked higher in some keywords, since there are always lots of competitors with higher page ranks. Google prefers them and lists them in the higher places. Assuming that the list you have created differs the list on the Google and you are getting low impressions on the keywords you are targetting and on the other hand you are getting decent impressions on the unexpected keywords. Now what you are thinking? Although it seems to be a failure, you can use this information to your advantage. This is Google way of saying, “You should be concentrating on these keywords, not these ones!”.

Secondly, under the bold written “Search queries” (in the top of the page), there should be a link “Top pages”. Now click on it. You will see that which pages on your site are most popular and which are less, which are getting more page views and which are getting less. Similar to keywords, you should again use this information to your advantage, you should focus on the content that you are successful at it, like in the real life situations. By this way you will not be wasting your time to create content that you are not successful with. Instead you can set your focus on the content which is probably help you more in your goals. This is not changing your niche, this is tweaking/optimizing it.

Click on the “Links to your site” from the left menu. You should be seeing a list of sites that links to your site. If you don’t see any sites, you should do some link-building, seriously. You might be surprised with this list, this a reflection of your site’s success. If your site is successful, then it is referenced by others. Links by others are valuable, because Google uses them to determine your page rank. If a site with higher page rank than yours links to you, then your page rank will probably increase, as a consequence your site will take higher places in the search results.

Now click on the link “Subscriber stats”. Your feeds may not be indexed by Google, in this case you should submit your feeds as sitemaps. This is very useful, Google indexes your last minute updates by this feed sitemaps. Lastly navigate to “Diagnostics”>”HTML suggestions”. This one is also useful, which gives suggestions about Meta description, Title tags and Non-indexable content. Following the suggestions showed here, helps Google to index your site better and more. These are just valuable information to know.

Remember to check other links like “Lab”, which gives you an idea about your site’s performance (page load times), may be it needs to be optimized, do check it and always check if your sitemaps have errors. The main idea is to focus on the content that you are successful.

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