Google Webmaster is an amazing tool, and if you are a serious blogger, you should never avoid the Google Webmaster’s tools.
From an SEO perspective, they’re a life-saver because they give you complete information about how your site functions in the Google Search engine.
The Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools) offers many tools that will let you thoroughly analyze your blog. From this analysis, you can work on problem areas to make your blog rank better in the Google Search engine.
Remember that search engine optimization (SEO) is a gradual process and doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes it takes weeks or months to get a proper search engine ranking.
I will not be talking about backlinks or other strategies for SEO ranking in this post.
Instead, I will be sharing how you can use the best free SEO tool called Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools) to optimize your blog for search engines.
How To Make Your Blog Search Friendly Using Google Search Console:
1. Submit Sitemap to Google
Generate a sitemap of your blog and submit it via the Google Search Console. This will help Google crawl your site effectively, and you can keep track of how many links are being indexed by Google.
If you have not yet submitted your sitemap, go ahead and submit your sitemap with the Google Webmaster Tool.
2. Webmaster Settings
The Webmaster Settings section enables you to configure some important things like “Geographic target”.
If your blog or service is limited to one particular region, you should configure the target settings for that region.
For example, one of my client WordPress blogs is for Australian kids fashion, so I configured her “Geographic target” as Australia.
The same goes with your blog or service. If your blog targets globally, leave it as is.
For the “Preferred domain”, if you are blogging on WordPress, know that WordPress takes care of the whole “www.” thing. However, I still suggest using Google’s Webmaster Tools to configure this setting.
“Crawl rate” depends on how often you update your blog.
I always let Google decide, though depending on how often you update, you might like to play with this setting.
3. Manage Google Sitelinks
Briefly, sitelinks are the pages from your site which Google finds useful, and from my experience, the pages you link to the most will define your sitelinks.
Google then displays these sitelinks on its Search results.
Sometimes Google adds less useful posts or pages like the disclaimer page or the privacy policy as a sitelink. In this case, you can use this feature of the Search Console tool to configure your sitelinks.
Note: You can’t add links to be included in your sitelinks from here, but you can block unwanted links.
4. Search Analytics
The “Queries” feature of the Google Webmaster Tool will show you which keyword you are ranking for, your Google position, and a link to the post.
You can use WordPress plugins like SEO Smart Link to auto-link such keywords to maintain your ranking. This will also try to push posts on the second page to the first page of Google Search.
This is one of the top features that you should be using now.
5. Keywords
If your blog is about shoes and you rank for keywords like shirts and trousers, even though you are on the first page, all of the traffic you are generating is useless.
The Google Webmaster “Keywords” tool determines the keyword Google has found while crawling your site.
If you are ranking for a wrong keyword, your strategy should be to find the cause while trying to show related and useful keywords to the search engine.
Others
There are many other tools like:
These are all equally important.
I suggest you spend some time inside your Google Webmaster tool (aka Search Console) and come back here to the comments section with your queries.
Also, let us know which feature of the Google Search Console tool you find most useful. Let’s make a good discussion thread about SEO using the Google Webmaster Tool!
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