Google Webmaster tool is one of the best and free tool provided by Google for assessing your website and its performance. It is used by the majority of webmasters and it helps a lot while doing and search engine optimization campaign for any website. Getting your website registered with Google Webmaster tool is simple and you just need to verify it by uploading a file to the root of your website.
The benefits of using a Google Webmaster Tool are many, but I have listed some of the important uses of using this amazing tool.
1) Identify Crawling Issues
Usually there might be lot of crawling issues related to a website, depending upon its design and architecture. The Google Webmaster Tools helps you in fixing crawl errors by showing up potential crawl errors in the dashboard.
2) Robots.txt File Generation
The Google Webmaster dashboard has a robots.txt generating tool which helps you to easily generate your customized robots.txt file.
This is really helpful for those who do not have any idea about creating a robots.txt file of his own.
3) Removing unwanted URLs
The tools helps you to find out the unwanted and broken links which you need to sort out. Keeping unwanted and broken links in your website would harm your SEO campaign and hence it is better to get rid of them.
4) Specifying a Preferred Domain version
The tool helps you to specify a preferred domain version for your website. For example if you wish Google to see you website without the www version, then you can set it accordingly.
5) Identify Errors with Onpage Elements
Google Webmaster tool helps to find out errors related to certain on page elements that is associated with a website.
6) Get Details of Top Search Terms
The tool provides you a list of top search terms with the most impression and click through rates. By viewing you can decide which way you should accelerate your online marketing campaign.
7) Know how Googlebot Sees your site
Googlebot views a site entirely differently from the way a human does. If you want to know how Googlebot sees your site, then it is possible with the Google Webmaster tool.
8) Manage Site Links
If you have site links appearing for your website in the Google search results, you can decide which links to appear and which one not to appear with the help of Google Webmaster tool.
9) Receive Guideline Notification
The tool sends you certain guideline notification on a regular basis to notify you about certain guideline and other useful information.
10) Get Back Link Information
The Webmaster tool would be able to provide you the latest list of back Links a site has got.
11) Threat Detection and Cleaning
If there is any website threat such as malware attack, then the tool lets you know and helps you in cleaning it and getting back to business.
12) Set Preferred Geographical Location
If you want to promote your website over a certain geographical location, then Google Webmaster tool can help you by providing the option for setting up the preferred geographical location.
When I first started using the Webmaster tool, it had only a few options and facilities. But it has come a long way since then..hope to see more upgradations in the coming days…
you are right @Adams, it keeps on getting enhanced day by day..