If a website has any technical related issues and you are not able to find out it then this situation can be handled by Google webmaster tools which is one of the great set of tools provided by Google. It characterizes and diagnoses the technical problems which your site is facing.
The main purpose of this tool is to optimize your site as much as possible for all major search engines. If a site becomes search engine friendly then no one can stop it to get higher ranking and maximum visitors.
Google webmaster tools are capable of doing various things to optimize a site but the five most important things that you can accomplish with it are as following:
1. Diagnose the 404 error code in backlinks of your site and turn it into a live link
This is one of the most significant and advanced feature of Google webmaster tools. It can diagnose the 404 error code in the backlinks of your site and then turn it into a live link. The simple meaning of 404 error code is “Not Found”. It can be occurred if:
- A link to your site is misspelled at the time of putting it to one of the web pages.
- There is a problem in design of a website.
SO how do you get rid of this problem? Here we will tell what you need to do:
- Click the domain of your site in the dashboard of Google webmaster tools.
- Under the “Overview” section see “Not Found” and then click “Details”.
- Copy the URL that shows 404 error codes.
- 301 redirect the faulty URL with correct URL. It can be done either in .htaccess or by PHP redirect script.
- Now the next time when the visitors click that link they will get a live link.
2. Increase additional traffic to your site with “Top Search Queries”
In dashboard of Google webmaster tools you will find Statistics. Click on it and then go for Top search queries. Here you will get important things that help you in getting additional traffic for your site. These are Impressions and Traffic. Impressions give the measurement of how many times a site is appeared for a particular keyword. Traffic gives the measurement of those keywords that have generated most traffic for a site.
3. Know the Backlinks that are pointing to your Site
Backlinks are considered as one of the most important factor for ranking in search results. To know which backlinks are pointing your site, you need to go to Dashboard>Links>Pages with External Links. Now under this external link column you need to click on hyperlinked number which finally shows you the backlinks that are pointing your site. If you want to increase the quality of your backlinks, then check relevancy of link to your site. If not then start searching those sites that are related to your sites so that you will be able to get more traffic and quality links for your site.
4. Upload XML sitemap and check robots.txt
Go to dashboard > Sitemaps and Dashboard > Analyze robots.txt and upload XML sitemap and then check robots.txt file before uploading it to the top level of your server. Actually robots.txt helps in eliminating the duplicate content from the site which in turn maximizes the bandwidth.
5. Remove unimportant URLs from site
There are many web pages in a site that are not of use and unimportant for both search engines as well as visitors. You can blocked the URLs of those pages through robots.txt and then remove it from your site through Google Webmaster Tools. For this you need to go Dashboard > Tools > Remove URL. This way you are able to attain a clean index which means an efficient crawling of your web pages.
Great Resourceful article. What are your thoughts?