The Google Webmaster Tools collection is a powerful set of free online tools that you, as a blogger or webmaster can use to track visits to your site. If you are serious about tracking your web visitors and making sure your blog or site is ticking over and technically correct then you should include the Google Webmaster Tools as part of your blogging proccess.

Why You Should Be Using Google Webmaster Tools

It is all about the statistics and information on offer. Just look at the list below to see what I mean.

• Crawl Rate
  You get to see, straight from the horses mouth, when and how often the Googlebot hits your blog. Don’t like the crawl rate? Then make a change!
• Index Status
  Get an overview of what pages you’ve posted are actually appearing on Google and what can’t be found.
• Web Crawl Issues
  See errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site.
• Mobile Crawl Issues
  See errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site created specifically for viewing on mobile cell phones. In the age of N95s, iPhones and dozens of other mobile phones running a variety of mobile browsers, this is a key tool in making sure you’re visible on all devices.
• View Search Engine Queries
  You can view your top search queries month by month, location by location and mix those up with the top clicked queries from the same period.
• Feed (Subscriber) Stats
  If you’re not a FeedBurner user this one will give you an idea of the numbers using and subscribing to your blog feed. If you are a FeedBurner user, you won’t see your FeedBurner numbers reflected here (even though Google own FB).

What Else Can You Do?

• Add your blog’s sitemap (essential really if you want to get the best use from the service).
• Remove URLs from Google
• See what the GoogleBot sees when crawling
• View the different levels of PageRank across your blog / site
• View all internal / external links related to your blog / site
• Much more!

At the moment, I’m tracking eleven different blogs under the Google Webmaster Tools. Now, I don’t run this independently as I boost my stat tracking using the likes of Google Analytics and StatCounter. The screencap you see above is from a blog I have recently put on hiatus (visually represented by some aged queries in March) but it gives a look at the top twenty search queries over the month of August (all related to Liverpool Football Club).

You will need a Google account in order to register for the service (you can use an existing email address, you don’t neccessarily need to register for Gmail) and it certainly helps to have an XML sitemap for your blog as well. Don’t have one? If you’re a Wordpress user then try out this Google sitemap generator.

Popularity: 12% [?]