Benefits of Google’s Webmaster Tools

Darren Franks - January 19, 2010

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.