Review - Google Webmaster Tools

I make use of Google Webmaster Tools almost every single day. It makes management, submission and tracking of website positioning much easier. I used to daily review all the sites I manage to ensure their listings were still good and G was still able to crawl them. I still have to manually check Yahoo and MSN but these tools help automate the Google bit.

If you are not familiar with them, here is a quick walkthrough. Obviously you need a Google Account to do any of this.

1. Add Site. Enter your URL and click Go.
2. Verify Site. I like to use the HTML file option, just upload a randomly named HTML file and Google checks for its existence to verify you own the website.
3. Diagnostics. I am able to quickly see any major crawl or indexing errors with my site. I also like to set my Preferred Domain to www.domain.com. This ensures consistency across all of my sites.

The Statistics Tab
This section is by far the most useful. Google has recently updated this and the data it shows me saves a ton of keyword ranking research time. The first page I see shows top search queries and top search query clicks. But I get that from my Enquisite SE tracking software, the real valuable information here is the Google ranking.

When I send a client their monthly SEO report, they get a listing of their top 10 keywords and their Google/Yahoo/MSN position for each keyword. This Google tool gives me a quick easy way to find the ranking for my top 20 keywords right away!

Crawl Stats and Page Analysis are also useful to look through occassionally. Crawl Stats gives me PageRank info and Page Analysis gives me the most common words in my sites content and in external links to my site.

Sitemaps
I try to submit a sitemap for all websites that I manage. I have had a few issues with some sites making my crawler loop forever. I currently use this free tool to create my sitemaps: http://enarion.net/google/

In Conclusion
Most of these tools are readily available somewhere else on the web or included with some SEO software package. But Google is free, gives me a clean interface, and lets me easily manage all of my sites in one place. Free, easy, centralized. Im hooked.