Using Google's Webmaster Tools to Help Your Backlinking and Ranking

When you're trying to rank your website to get organic search traffic, backlinking is the key. In short, the more back links you get, the higher you will go in the SERPs. Now of course this is a relative thing, but it's important to understand why.

Trying to rank against strong "authority sites" that have high Pagerank and thousands of backlinks can be an exercise in futility. But generally speaking, the more links, the better your site will do. But all back links aren't created equally. Links from strong sites, those with a high Page rank, are worth more to your site than those with lower rank. It's actually the passing of this "link juice" that gives your target site it's boost. This means you want higher value links.

Just as important however, perhaps even more pertinently is whether or not Google sees and counts your links. Though they may index nearly every page, not every link they come across counts towards your SERP ranking. How do you know which is which? That's where Google's Webmaster Tools comes into play.

Webmaster Tools was designed to show the webmaster where their links are coming from. As such, you can see which of the backlinks you are taking the time to get are being seen AND counted by Google. If it isn't in Webmaster Tools, it isn't doing your site any good, at least as far as boosting your ranking is concerned. Another great use for Google's Webmaster Tools is for you to see which links you might be able to take more advantage of. When you see that your links are sticking for instance from your blogs, Squidoo lenses, other sites, etc., you immediately know they are more valuable links. So why not go back and re-visit those web sites? You might just be able to post more links, or put in links to your other sites.

I spend a lot of time in Webmaster Tools. I look to see where my backlinking efforts are paying off, focus further efforts where they count, and reduce the time I put into those that aren't paying me dividends. Plus I comb through the results always looking for new and better sites to go back to with more links. It's also worth noting that Webmaster Tools will show you the specific pages where you are linking to. You should make sure to vary your links, vary your anchor text, and don't just link to your home page, but your inner pages as well.

Make Google Webmaster Tools a routine part of your own "site intelligence". You'll find you can spend your time in a more valuable manner, and that you avoid going through the process of building, checking, waiting, checking some more, all for something that won't help you in the long fun anyway.

The author is working on more mundane topics including Miele Vacuums On Sale and Baby Potty Training for some homemaking publications.

A Beginner's Guide To Google's Webmaster Tools

If you are in the process of creating a website or have just discovered the Google Webmaster Tools then it would be best if you know to set it up and to be able to use it effectively

Webmaster tools are not only offered by Google but are also available from other major search engines, such as the Yahoo! 'Site Explorer' and Microsoft's 'Bing Webmaster Tools'. As commented by Google:

"Google's Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site."

Allowing any webmaster to identify any current issues or problems that may exist with site performance, including how the site itself performs within Google's search engine results pages (SERPs). Not forgetting to help improve the crawling and indexing of your site by using the webmaster tools.

To begin it is required that you sign up for the webmaster tools and then add your website, if you already have an existing Google account you can access all of these tools already. It will then be required to verify that you own the site and the easiest way to achieve this can be to upload a html file to your server or to link your Google Analytic s account with your webmaster tools.

Once logged in you can add a website URL to the webmaster tools by clicking on the 'Add a Site' button from the Home page. Enter your website address and then click 'Continue'. Once selected you will be asked to choose a verification method. Using the previously mentioned methods you can upload a HTML file to the server by downloading the 'HTML Verification File' as instructed and place it into the root file of your server. Or to simply select the option to 'Link your Google Analytic s Account'.

If you already have a Google Analytic s account and already have imported the data through to the Google webmaster tools this can help create a much richer data pool. If not simply select the 'Manage' option that is along from the website previously uploaded and then choose 'Google Analytic Profile' this will then allow you to choose the correct Google Analytic account that you want to import the data from.

If you have managed all of the above and all the data fields have began to populate this will be an essential tool that will help any webmaster in the beginning to help master the search engine optimisation techniques that will now be important to focus on now that you are properly being indexed by Google.

The information at your disposal will be very valuable to any webmaster in trying to calculate how their website is currently performing within the SERP's. This can be further enhanced by submitting a site map. This will help Google determine what pages exist within your website so each page can be indexed, if this is not included then not all pages may be displayed therefore affecting your search traffic. This can be carried out by submitting a site-map that is in a XML format not exceeding 10megs.

The initial information at your disposal will be the top search queries that turned your site as one of it's results, while showing your Google search rank for each of those searches. Not forgetting that it also displays all links to your website, keywords, internal links, crawl errors, site performance and much more. It should be very straightforward once set up, with much of the information be familiar to Google Analytics.