Gettin' Techy: Google Webmaster Tools
March 13th, 2011

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I’m not sure if many of you know that I was once a tech blogger, writing for sites including The Next Web and Lockergnome. I mean, I still do blog and tweet about nerdy stuff on my personal blog and Twitter accounts, but so far I haven’t touched tech with Relatively Chic.

I’m a nerd at heart, and I don’t say that lightly. I don’t mean “I use an iPhone, I’m a nerd,” it’s more like, “I get hot over cleanly coded HTML5, I’m a nerd.” In a former life I worked large business tech support behind the scenes at AT&T, so I grew a fondness for helping people out with their tech issues. So, here I am — popping the tech cherry on my fashion blog.

I’m new to the fashion blogging scene because I didn’t want to stick to strictly tech blogging forever — I love fashion and everything it entails. I’d like to start posting on fashion relevant tech topics including the nitty gritty of blogging, SEO, code, Photoshop, etc.

In my last FBFF post on balance, I mentioned Google Webmaster Tools as one of the things I use behind the scenes. Google Webmaster Tools is an easy-to-use tool that helps you learn more about your site. It’s important that everything’s running smoothly when it comes to search engines being able to find your blog — how else will people discover your great content?

What exactly does Google Webmaster Tools do?

• Helps you determine if your site is running slowly
• Lets you know if search engines are crawling your site
• Provides detailed reports about your page’s visibility in Google

What Google Webmaster Tools Isn’t:

• A full-blown traffic analytics tool — that’s for another post!

Getting Started

1. Visit Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Add your site. If you’re a Blogger user and signed into Google Webmaster Tools with the same Google account as your blog, it should show up here asking you to confirm your site. If not, you can simply add it through the Add a Site button.
3. Verify that you are the owner of the site. There will be multiple options for this.
4. Once verified, you will have access to a variety of tools and settings from the dashboard — site configuration (managing your site), your site on the web (how Google sees your site), and diagnostics (how Google may be getting stuck).

Exploring

There are a lot of things to sift through in Google Webmaster Tools, but here are four main things it can help with:

1. Submit a Sitemap. So, first things first: A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. You want to submit a sitemap so Google can keep up with all of your new content! It updates on a regular basis, and includes the most current pages of your blog as you create them. Submitting your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools gently nudges Google to crawl your latest pages. It sounds complicated, but don’t worry, it’s really not!

• For Blogger, you can submit a sitemap by simply adding atom.xml to the box when clicking on the Submit a Sitemap button.
• For WordPress, you can install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress plugin. The author of the plugin covers some really great FAQ on sitemaps.

2. Managing Geographic Targeting: This is not necessarily for everyone. Go into Site Configuration –> Settings for this. Now, use this only if your site is offering content strictly for the country you’re in (like selling a product) or if you manage multiple websites or subdomains targeted at foreign countries. It mainly helps to control where your content is seen. Now, for most people, you’ll keep this unchecked so your site will show up on Google in all countries.

3. Keep track of search queries and links to your site: You can see what people are searching for when your site pops up in the search result, and how often they’re actually clicked (amongst other stats). This is the fun part! Here’s a view of my dashboard with a summary of queries, links, etc, and a view of my top search query stats. I have a thing for graphs and stuff, so I like this part way too much. Oh, and don’t make fun of me for my numbers, I’m new around these parts!

As you can see, “light bright” is a pretty popular query, but why? Well, I happened to tag my DIY Inspiration: String Lights post with those words so, although older, the post comes up when people search for “light bright.” Here’s a quick breakdown of what the numbers mean:

The links section is really great info too, when it comes down to it. This shows what websites are linking to you, and what they’re linking to. In general, the more websites that link to you, the higher you’ll show up in search results. [I'll repeat: This is a highly generalized statement because search engines use a frequently tweaked, complex algorithm to serve up search results.]

4. Monitor site performance: I’m a little sad that this tool is only usable in Firefox, as I use Chrome as my default browser, but it’s definitely worth using! Simply go to Labs –> Site Performance to install the browser add-on. It’ll give a few good suggestions on how to increase your page load time. I noticed that for me, the add-on suggested a few things that wouldn’t make much of a difference, but the key here is to get a general idea on where you need to improve things.

A few of my go-to tips for improving site speed: Keep your image file size down (save for web!) and don’t use millions of plug-ins. Flash also tends to slow pages down a lot.

Keep in mind…

Google Webmaster Tools can be overwhelming, that’s for sure. It’s overly detailed, but you need to remember what’s important. It gives you an idea on what people are searching for when, and if, they come across your blog. Mainly, Webmaster Tools helps to make sure your site’s on Google, which is hugely important in the end!

[Final tip: You should register your site with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to cover those search engines too.]

What other tech/blogging issues or questions do you have and would like me to cover? Let me know in the comments!

Sophie Catface sez, "If you liek dis post, plz consider sharing, leaving a comment or subscribing to teh RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed readerz. You can even follow my mommeh on Twitter @kristin. TANKS!"