Google Webmaster tool is very useful and popular solution provided by Google to help Blogger and website administrator to optimize their product to make more SEO friendly. Most of the newbie’s don’t have much information about Webmaster and how to use it. In this article I am going to present an in-depth review of the functionally that is provided by Google webmaster.

For What purpose I can use Google Webmaster?

Most of the users think that Google Webmaster is used only to submit your sitemap to Google, but it is not true. There are lots of other things also that can be done with Google Webmaster. Some of the most prolific use of Google Webmaster is shown in the figure:

How to Register my Blog/Website with Google Webmaster Tool?

1) Sign in to Google Webmaster tool by following link (You can use your Gmail account to sign in)

2) Register your site with Google Webmaster by clicking on Add URL button and entering site address as shown below

3) After this you have to verify your site. There are various methods to do the verification and they are as follows:

• HTML Tag
• HTML File Upload
• Google Analytics
• Domain name provider

Choose the method that suits you the most.

4) After you get your site/blog gets verified you can see the entry of your website on Dashboard as shown below:

How to Submit Sitemap to Google Webmaster?

Done with the verification part now the next thing to do is submit your website sitemap in Google webmaster so that Google can index your web pages frequently. Adding Sitemap is very easy, just click on the website name on dashboard and it will take you to the Sitemap Page. Click on the Sitemap Tab as shown below:

Click on Add/Test Sitemap to add the sitemap. Enter your sitemap in the text field as shown.

Note: For wordpress Blog just enter sitemap.xml in the field as shown in the figure and for Blogger you have to manually enter the sitemap for every 500 New Posts like for example shown in the box below:

/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 /atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500 .

Just change the Start-index value everytime you reached the max-results limit.

Things that you can check in Google Webmaster

1) Check Crawl Error – Navigate to Health->Crawl Errors to see the crawling error in your website. You can check crawl stats and all other things in this section

2) Track your Search Query by navigating to Traffic->Search Queries and it will show all the search queries that your Blog/Website is receiving. See figure below

3) Link of your Site Links are very important for SEO part and it is necessary to check the sites that are linking with your Blog. To check which sites are linking navigates to Traffic->Links to your site and it will show all the Links that are linking to your site.

How to Optimize Blog/Website for SEO with Google Webmaster

1) Check HTML Improvements – Navigate to Optimization->HTML Improvements and it will show all the things that need your attention to help your site’s user experience and performance.

There are lot more you can do with Google Webmaster. Try to explore that yourself. I hope that after going through this article you will be able to use Google Webmaster’s more effectively.