If you have a website, there are a number of free tools available to webmasters through Google that are absolutely essential to help you increase your website’s visibility and traffic. The Google search engine is one of the most used search tools on the Internet. You can find these tools by going to Google.com and then clicking on the business. Ranking high in the results for keyword phrases that relate to your products or services will increase your traffic and sales. Google provides a number of free tools that help you see exactly how well your website is doing and show you what needs improvement, which pages are not ranked, and what works for you.
Although Google offers a number of different tools for a small fee, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on Google Webmaster Tools. This free service lets you know a number of valuable pieces of information about your website. First, you need to verify that you are the owner of the site by adding a specific meta tag to your home page header or uploading an HTML file. Once you do this, you are better equipped to optimize your site.
Google Webmaster Tools: Diagnostics
Googlebot is the web crawler that searches the internet to find relevant pages that match the search terms that people enter into the Google search engine. The diagnostics section focuses on what Googlebot comes up with when crawling your site, as well as the mechanics of your site.
Web tracking-This shows you if there are any errors or problems that Googlebot encounters when crawling your site.
Content analysis– Problems with your site’s meta tags, meta titles, and descriptive information will appear here.
Mobile tracking-The problems and errors in the pages designed for the visualization of mobile phones are found here.
Google Webmaster Tools: Statistics
This set of tools focuses on the traffic coming to your site and how it gets there.
Top search queries – Find out what keyword terms the people generating your site are using in the results list, the percentage of clicks you got when your site pages were displayed and what number in the page list your site appears in the search engine Google search.
Tracking statistics-this shows you a bar graph of how your pages are doing on PageRank as rated when Google’s Googlebot crawled them. They are displayed with a high, medium, low, or not yet assigned rating.
Subscriber Statistics-If you have subscriber feeds like RSS or Atom available on your site, this will show you how many subscribers you have for those feeds.
What does the Google robot see-this shows you what phrases and content are used in external links to your site. It helps if these sentences are related to the content, products, and services on your site to help drive the right traffic.
Statistics index-this tool allows you to see which pages have links to your site and how Google indexes your pages.
Google Webmaster Tools: Links
Pages with external links-Here you will see which pages of your website have inbound links from other websites.
Pages with internal links-Here you can find out which of your pages have links pointing to them from other pages on your site.
Site Links-This shows you which of your links can appear directly in Google search results.
Google Webmaster Tools: Tools
There are a number of other tools that you can use for free as well. For example, you can submit a sitemap with all the pages on your site to speed up the process of including all the pages on your site in the Google search engine. You also can:
Analyze robots.txt
Generate robots.txt
Set of geographic targets
Improved image search
Manage site verification
Set crawl rate
Set preferred domain
Remove URL
Before you invest in any expensive ranking tools or analytical software, see what Google has to offer for free!