Webupon

Often the launch of a new site, many are wondering how to monitor the proper referencing of the site, if Google can access all the pages, well indexed, and so on. Therefore to monitor the listing of your sites, Google has introduced Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to help website publishers (and thus bloggers too) to control their ranking and analyze the various links and outgoing. I propose today to see how to use this tool step by step and show you the detailed information that can be drawn on the listing of its site.

How to create your account?

To begin, we must go to the login page GWT to connect via a Google account (if you do not, you can easily create one here). Once connected, you arrive on the scoreboard GWT. On this page you can find a list of all your future websites. If this is the first time you connect, you must first add a site by entering the URL of the site and then clicking on “Add Site”.
You then arrive on a second page which will be the same for all sites: the “Overview”. Before you see all the different menus of this tool, you must validate your website ie to prove to Google that it’s a site you are the author, the owner or webmaster . This step is very important because without verification, you will not have access to information on the referencing of your site. To do this, click on “Submit your site.

To validate a site, Google offers two methods:

By adding a meta tag if you choose this option, Google invites you to add in the code of your site (in the ) a line of code with a specific text. IF you know how to modify the HTML code of your site, add this line in the file, put the file online and click on “Check”.
By placing an empty HTML file on the server of your website. Again, just follow the directions from Google: create an empty file, rename it with the name, upload the file to your server, make sure you have much access as you suggested Google, then click “Check”.

Following this audit, Google tells you that the site is now validated. You can then access the data.

Add your site sitemap

Historically, this service of Google served only one thing: tell Google sitemap of your website. Since then the site has evolved into GWT and give you a range of information in addition to the name of the sitemap.

What is a sitemap? A sitemap is an XML file that is to say a very simple and with a strict structure for data organized in a uniform manner. For your website or your blog, the sitemap is literally a map of your site, ie that this file will include all existing pages on your site. In the case of a blog, we can find a list of URLs of articles, a list of URLs of the categories, archives. To see a concrete example and formatted, I invite you to take a look at one of Monetiweb. This file is asking for the referral because you can tell Google and other search engines all the pages to be referenced rather than let them bother to try to find all alone?

How to create the sitemap of the website? Creating a sitemap for each site is not alone. You can create your own file in strict observance of the conventions or otherwise ensure that this file is generated automatically. And therein lies the idea as a blog for example, the file will be updated automatically each time add the URLs of new articles without having to worry you. You can use a plugin for your blog. There are Google Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress, Gsitemap for DotClear1, Sitemaps Dotclear2. For Blogger or other platforms for self-hosted blog, the sitemap is usually automatic, so you do to take care of you.
Add a sitemap of your site in GWT: last step in configuring GWT, Google proposes to indicate for each of your sites a sitemap or more files for it to associate your site in these algorithms referencing. It is therefore a very important step to the launching of a new blog.

Understanding Google Webmaster Tools

Once your site is added to GWT and Google has had time to index your site, then the real phase of analysis of the information provided. To see clear in all this information, I propose to detail all the categories along the left menu.

Overview: this page provides an overview of the indexing of your website.

You will learn by example when Google went for the last time on your site. Information Rule of the index is to be taken with caution for several weeks because it tells me that page appears in Google’s index and that whatever my website! More interesting then you have a list of errors encountered by Google when crawling your website. If you have any errors reported by a small yellow exclamation point, the link refers you to a page explaining that I will detail a little further.
Diagnosis:

Overview: This sub-section is a summary of 3 topics

Web crawl: this category is very important because it lists all the errors encountered by Google in the analysis of your site. Take the time to read the errors and how to solve them. To do this, GWT separates errors according to their type (http errors found, inaccessible, etc.). For each error listed, Google shows you the exact reason of the problem and an explanation to solve the problem. While some of these errors seem obscure, I invite you to come discuss this in the dedicated section of our forum.]

Exploring the mobile web: this sub-section applies only to sites offering a version for mobile phones. In this case, it tells you if Google is still encountered errors.
Content analysis: the latter sub-category is also very important because it identifies the problems encountered at the tags on your pages or the content of your pages. For example, pages that has the same description or tags too short, etc.. Here again, Google shows you how to remedy the problem if necessary.

Statistics

Overview: This sub-section is a summary of 3 topics

• Top queries: this sub-section lists the one hand, the 20 search queries for which your site has appeared most often in search results (queries), and other parts of the research from which users clicked on the link to your site (click tracking queries frequently). These data therefore give you very good information about the behavior of Google users from your site. You can understand from what keywords they searched just as at home, etc.. What is quite amazing, is that Google offers filters sort by date (a week ago, 2semaines, the previous month, etc.) but also by country and by type of research (or research classic blog)

• What Googlebot sees: the sub-heading which seems rather complicated at first, shows you how Google see your site. This means that you have the list of words or phrases on Google to find other sites that link to your website. You can see all the words used by other websites that talk about you.
• Crawl stats: This sub-section is completed only if your website already has some length because it indicates an idea of the Pagerank of the pages on your site. I must confess that this information is quite vague and not me personally not much unless you compare them to other websites that we have.
• Index stats: this category is just a simple list of the various indications that you can have on a website by typing some keywords into Google. For example, you can search in all Google pages indexed by Google by typing site: monsite.com.
• Statistics relating to subscribers: This sub-section is one of the newest tool added to GWT. It tells you, if your site offers one or more RSS feeds like a blog, people who have subscribed to your RSS feeds via a tool like Google Reader, iGoogle or Orkut. This list does not include the RSS feed generated by Feedburner (owned by Google I remind you).

Links:

Overview: This sub-section is a summary of the 3 topics.

Pages with external links: This sub-section lists the list of pages on your website to which other websites have established links. You and each page number and the list (click on the number) from other sites pointing to this page. As this list is sorted, you can easily tell what are the pages to which most people are pointing and therefore potentially more interesting. This represents a very good complement to the link: monsite.com, which lists only sites that point to the home page of your site.

Pages with internal links: This sub-section is complementary to the previous page shows your site a list of pages on your site (and not other sites) for this page. You can also see that for a page X, you have pages X, W and Z of your site that points to it.

Site links: if your site is well indexed and has a little seniority, Google will present “site links” in its results list. You’ll find an example here. If so, this sub-heading you eliminate some of the links in the results list and are added by default Google.

Sitemaps:

Overview: This sub-section you list the sitemap you have already added your site and are well covered by Google.

Adding a Sitemap: this sub-heading allows you to add a sitemap to your site altogether.

Tools:

Overview: This sub-section is a summary of the 8 topics.

Analyze robots.txt: this sub-heading allows you to check your robots.txt file is working properly and is interpreted by Google. The robots.txt file, among others, to indicate to search engines which pages or page types not to index. I will return to the importance of this file in a forthcoming article.

Generate robots.txt: this sub-heading is a form to assist you in creating a robots.txt file correctly.

Manage site verification: this sub-section lists the information to verify your site in GWT as I explained above.

• Set crawl: this sub-heading tells you an indication at what speed / frequency and covers Google indexes your website. You can reduce the speed but I do not see in what circumstances it may be interesting.

Set geographic target: this sub-section is very interesting because it allows you to set the country where your website. You should know that Google usually automatically assign this information to a website based on the geographical location of your host. So if you host your site in the USA but you want to reach a french, this option allows you to force Google to link your site to the country France. So when someone try something specifying France in Google you will appear.

Set preferred domain: this sub-section allows you to force Google to use either a URL with “www” before your domain name is without the “www” as Monetiweb.com. We must not forget to set this point to help once again Google.

Image Search Advanced: this category enables you to allow Google to better index the images on your site for its search engine for images. Feel free to check is the case!
Remove URLs: again this sub-section represents a practical feature in some cases. Indeed, it allows you to block access to a specific page that Google shows the way forward to a successful transaction.

• Gadgets: the latter sub-category you install a gadget (widget =) Google on your iGoogle page to monitor data directly from GWT iGoogle