How to Use Google Webmaster Tools to help with SEO?

If you are a newcomer to Google Webmaster Tools or haven’t even given it a test drive yet, you should know that there are a number of very useful tools that will help you with your site’s SEO.

What better place to find out what’s ailing your site than where it matters most, Google. After all, they are dealing out the search rankings, and it’s useful to know what they think about your pages.

Rather than bombard you with the entire suite of tools, here are 4 of the most useful ones to get you going!

4 Great Google Webmaster Tools reports to inform your SEO

• HTML improvements – The report shows you how well your site does behind the curtain. Information like if you have missing, improper or duplicate title tags, descriptions and even content are definitely things you’ll want a heads-up on. HTML Improvements will help you do exactly that, make improvements!
• Search Queries – The single most useful report, Search Queries returns a wealth of data including impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate, keyword terms searched, image and video SEO and more. The keyword section only goes back for 30 days, but it gives you some data you can plug into other tools.
• Crawl errors – This report will show you which pages are returning a 404 error code, that is, not found. These you’ll need to take care of as soon as possible, as you are losing traffic, and your search engine results may be skewed as well.
• Links to your site – This one returns a list of sites that are linking to your pages, and will show you what pages are drawing the most interest. This can be, and often is, quite surprising, as pages or content you might not have thought was significant may very well be drawing loads of traffic to your site!

Google Webmaster tools are a very useful tool for telling you what you need to be concerned with and fixing on your site. It ought to be your first stop, even though you may eventually use a more sophisticated paid tool to dive deeper.