How to Use Google Webmaster Tools for Starters

You need Google. Anyone doing online business needs to get a hold of Google Webmaster Tools. This is a set of tools that helps you monitor your indexing status and see how visible your website is to Google. It will help you improve your rankings. It allows you to submit sitemaps and also see the keywords that are bringing traffic.

Submitting a sitemap from your website will increase the speed of getting indexed on Google. Reading the keywords data will help you know how to make future marketing or content decisions based on what's being searched out there.

How to use Google Webmaster Tools

First, set up your Google Webmaster Tools account

You will need a Google account. If you already have an email or analytics account with them, you can sign in with that and go to google.com/webmasters/tools.

• Once signed in and there, you will see a button to add your site, which will say, Add A Property. When adding your website, just enter the domain name without the "www."
• It will then take you to a page asking you to verify your website. You can use your analytics account to do this, if you already have one, or you can choose one of the alternative methods offered.
• Once you're verified, you will be taken to your dashboard and you are ready to roll. It may need a short amount of time before actual data starts to appear.

Next, set up a Sitemap to improve page rankings

Setting up a sitemap is a way to let Google know about all of your content as you continue to create it. Without a sitemap, Google bots will probably find you at some point, but may miss some of your content. This will cover much more, speed things up and help with your rankings.

• First, you need to create an XML sitemap. If you are working with Wordpress, you can install a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps.
• Once installed, go to the settings and you will find the url of your new sitemap index file.  You can leave all the settings alone, except that you may want to scroll down to "Change Frequencies" and increase the frequency of indexing on your posts. If you post weekly, it would be good to set it at "weekly."
• If you're not working with Wordpress, or don't want another plugin, you could go to Xml-sitemaps.com and generate an index file there.
• Next, go to your Webmaster Tools account and find on the left side of the screen, Crawl=> Sitemaps.
• You will be able to add your sitemap url there.

Search Queries and Keywords

Once you're indexed you can start looking into what kind of searches are bringing traffic. Clicking Search Traffic will open up all kinds of data. It will show your site traffic as well as the potential for traffic across Google search results. You can also see who's linking to your site.

In the search query section, click on any of the listed keywords to see how they're performing. You can see which pages are ranking for those words and base more content around them.

There's much more to say about this, but I've tried to keep this simple for starters. In the comments section, let me know if you have questions, or feel free to chime in about your own experience with Google Webmaster Tools.