Google’s Webmaster Tools is a central location for webmasters to view and update diagnostic data concerning their websites in relation to the Google algorithm. What are some of its SEO benefits?

From an SEO perspective, Google’s Webmaster Tools has really pertinent information, such as “Top Search Queries” and “Links to your Site”. Top Search Queries” allows webmaster to analyze which search term or “keywords” are the most used on their site and which position in Google they are ranking for those keywords. “Links to your Site” lets you see the websites that are linking to your site. It even breaks down which pages these websites are linking to. This is invaluable to webmasters as this is the only way to get a comprehensive view of which sites are linking to you. Simply using the “Link:” command in Google only gives you a very limited report of a site’s backlinks due to Google’s stringent guidelines on privacy.

Google’s Webmaster Tools also facilitates your website’s crawlability. By using Webmaster Tools’ XML Sitemap Submission, you can submit an XML sitemap to help Google find the deeper level pages on your website. Webmaster Tools will also let you view errors in your robots.txt file, “Page Not Found” errors and even the last time the Google spider successfully accessed your homepage.

Personally, Google’s Webmaster Tools is one of the most useful SEO tools around and there are many reasons for using it.

It has always been the general consensus that the keywords meta tag was no longer recognized by any of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing). We now know that to be partially true as Google announced last month that it completely ignores this meta tag and Yahoo! now claims that they haven’t been recognizing keywords for a good while either. Bing, it is claimed, has never recognized the keywords meta tag. What are the SEO ramifications of this?

It is the general belief that the keywords meta tag was devalued by the search engines some time ago as many webmasters used it to “stuff” them with as many keywords as possible in an attempt to rank for as many terms (relevant or not) as possible. The search engines quickly got wise to this and started to eliminate factoring it into their algorithms. From a user experience point of view, keywords are a non-factor, as 99% of Internet users have no idea of what a meta tag, let alone a keyword, is since you can only view them as part of the source code. From an SEO point of view, it is probably one less thing that you have to optimize for; titles and descriptions are now more important than ever.

However, an interesting article in Search Engine Land appeared on October 14th stating that although a Yahoo representative at SMX East stated that Yahoo also ignores the tag, an experiment was performed (placing the random letters  “xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk” in the keywords tag) which completely contradicted this. The random letters were placed in the keywords tag of Search Engine Land’s website homepage to see if “xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk” would be returned as a search result and it was.

In any event, even though the keywords tag is almost entirely dead, it would still benefit webmasters to utilize it, even for the primary keyphrase for the page, as some search engines still use it and Google and Bing may change their minds and use it as part of their algorithms in the future, even if they don’t announce it.

On September 25, Google announced a new feature on their official blog that allows users to “jump” to specific sections of a webpage directly from the “snippet” underneath the link in the search engine results pages. These “named anchors” work differently from the Google site links in that they allow for people to get to the part of the page that contains the actual information they want based on their search queries.

“Named Anchors” in search results snippet:
  

We can see from the example in the above screenshot, taken from Google’s experimental platform “Caffeine”, the named anchors helps the user get an even more relevant search experience in that the user can now skip the excess information on a page and get right to what they want.

In essence, the use of “named anchors” in the snippets will assist the user to find the specific information they are looking for much faster and encourage webmasters to create well constructed pages with proper sections with good sub-headers. If a webmaster focuses on utilizing keywords in H tags (any words wrapped in an “H Tag” is given more weight in search engines”) and making the page divided in a logical manner, they have the opportunity to improve inbound traffic as any snippet with a named anchor will more than likely inspire more people to go to their page.