On Tuesday, we discussed how to spot check your website each week. Now let’s look take a look at the next tool to use to keep your website running at 100%: Google Webmaster.

Google Webmaster

Your website should be connected to this free tool provided by Google to help you monitor its health and progress. The Google Webmaster provides a myriad of different tools to make sure your site is running smoothly. Here are the two main areas of your Google Webmaster:

• Dashboard: The Dashboard is a quick screen showing you a snapshot of some of the most frequently used Google tools in the webmaster. On this screen you will see Crawl Errors, Search Queries and Sitemap.
• Configuration: This field is where you find all the tools you need to use Google Webmaster. You will have access to add users, check settings and adjust items pertaining to your web address or URL.

The three sections of Google Webmaster described below are used to check a website’s status:

• Health: This is the area in which you will be able to see if Google has identified a Crawl Error. Should a Crawl Error be found, Webmaster is indicating that the Google bot is unable to access a page on your website – i.e you have a broken link. It’s extremely important to identify and fix crawl errors to ensure your broken links are fixed. Another tool provided in the Health section is the Malware feature, which will tell if your website has been infected by a virus.
• Traffic: This section relates to being found in Google search queries and the traffic you are receiving. Here you can review both inbound links to your website and internal links.
• Optimization: This category has some important tools for double-checking your website. Review the Sitemaps feature to confirm that all the content on your website is submitted to Google. If you put up content daily or weekly, then take note of the numbers being seen in Google each week on the report. HTML Improvements is also found in this section and it will show you pages and posts on your site that are missing Title Tags, as well as places where you used duplicates. Google really likes unique titles per page, so be sure to edit these identical tags to properly optimize your site.

By spending a little time with your Google Webmaster each week, you can ensure that your website stays in tip-top shape.