Google WebmastersTools is a great tool for webmasters to manage various key aspects in their pre- or post- efforts of getting their website indexed on Google. Whether your site is already indexed, or if it is yet to be indexed on Google, webmasters tools service offered by Google is very helpful for webmasters to manage their Search Engine Optimization relationship with Google.
It is very easy to use Google Webmasters Tools if you have simple internet browsing awareness and have all the ownership credentials to your website. All the important and simple steps about How to use Google Webmasters Tools are discussed in this Factoid.
Simple Steps for using Google Webmasters Tools effectively:
- Add your website to Google Webmasters Tools using the “Add a site” button.
- Once you add your website, it will require verifying the site ownership either by adding a Meta tag given by Google Webmasters Tools, or by creating the html file as per the Google Webmasters Tools instructions
- Upon successful verification of the site, you need to enter the path to sitemap of your website. If you try to add the link or path to your sitemap, you will know within a few hours if it is accepted or rejected by Google Webmasters Tools.
- If you see a red X cross next to the sitemap path, this may require generating an external xml sitemap file, using the xml sitemap generator websites. You will get to see many free xml sitemap generating websites, which generate an xml sitemap file once you answer just a few questions in less than 5 minutes. Once you generate the xml sitemap file from any of the third-party websites, you can download an uncompressed version of the same to your local machine.
- Upload the downloaded, compressed xml sitemap file on to the "public_html" folder of the website hosting server. Once you upload and publish the file on the website successfully, you can now add the path to your sitemap page by just adding “sitemap.xml” in the path.
- You may use the above process while your website has less than 500 pages, and you can repeat this exercise as and when there are some additions and deletions in the pages of the website.
- Once you log in to the Google Webmasters Tools account, you can see a crawler access errors page, which will show you the entire crawl or 404 page errors, or any other kind of website access errors that have occurred when Google tried to access your website.
- You will get various html suggestions by Google as per its understanding of the website based on the Googlebot’s crawling of the website.
