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SEO With Google Webmaster Central
By Susan Esparza, Bruce Clay, Inc. (http://www.bruceclay.com) (c) 2007

With the release of Webmaster Central
(http://www.google.com/webmasters/) from beta, Google has made
a strong statement that serious Web site owners need to be
concerned with, and aware of, a range of data regarding their
sites. Crawl errors, backlinks and page load times are all
available for a webmaster to study and parse through in order
to refine and integrate with their search engine optimization
strategy.

Along with Yahoo and MSN, Google provides information at
Sitemaps.org regarding how to create an XML file that will feed
information to the search engines about a site. Google is
committed to assisting webmasters with their sites, even going
so far as to enable comments on the official Webmaster Central
blog, the only official Google blog that has done so.

Statistics for Unverified Sites

There are two ways to take advantage of the Webmaster tools –
site owners can remain unverified and be given a limited look at
their site through Google eyes, or verify and receive a more
complete look. For sites that are not verified, there are three
tools to learn to love: Site information regarding Sitemap
details and errors, basic indexing information about your site,
and a page for robots.txt analysis and correction where site
owners can test their robots.txt file against several
user-agents to ensure search engine comprehension.

Upon adding a site to your Google account, you are given a look
at the My Sites page, which shows all the sites represented
under your Google account. If you only have one site added, you
will be immediately taken to the Diagnostic Tab for that site
where you can get information about the last crawl date and the
site's index status (whether it is included in the index or
not). From this page, you can also test your robots.txt file and
discover if Googlebot is able to spider your site without
encountering problems. Improperly written robots.txt files can
block the search engines from indexing relevant content.

From the Sitemaps tab on the My Sites page, you can view
information about the Sitemaps you have uploaded to Google and
view any errors that the spiders have encountered. Information
includes the date that the sitemap was last submitted, as well
as the date it was last downloaded by Google. You have the
ability to delete any Sitemap and resubmit an updated version of
a current Sitemap. Pay attention to the section that lists error
codes, some of these could hinder the indexing of your site.
Remember the goal of the Sitemaps protocol is to get your site
indexed--errors in the document will get in the way of that.

When presented with these powerful tools and data sets, many
webmasters are simply overwhelmed and don't know where to begin
or how to leverage the information to their advantage. The most
asked questions are about the XML feed. What is it? Do you have
to have it? Will your site be indexed without it? As with most
things Google, the answer is multipart.

The Sitemaps protocol, which is supported by all three major
engines, is merely an XML feed designed to help the engines
discover and index all the pages of your Web site. The feed
gives information about page creation, updates, and importance.
If a page is very important to your site and is not indexed, the
feed can help in getting that page spidered. The XML feed will
not make your rankings better, except in that it might help the
search engine find pages supporting your theme that it didn't
previously know about.

The Sitemap isn't a requirement for being indexed, it just makes
it easier. Google states:

   A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as
   your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not
   replace our normal methods of crawling the web. Google still
   searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in
   the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are never
   penalized for using this service.

If your site is already being crawled and included in the index,
you probably don't need a Sitemap, but that doesn't mean that
you shouldn't still be using the webmaster tools to get a better
idea of what Google sees when it crawls your site. Each tool is
targeted to a different area.

It should be emphasized that even if you do have a Sitemaps
file, it does not replace the need for a physical site map on
your Web site. Despite the similarity of names, each serves a
distinctly different purpose. Google's Webmaster Guidelines
suggest that you include a site map on your page for both users
and search engine spiders.

Statistics for Verified Sites

To get the most value out of these tools, your site must be
verified. Viewing your site the way Google sees it is often an
enlightening experience and will alert you to errors Google has
encountered while crawling your site. The problems most commonly
found are often also easy to fix, such as 404 errors that
redirect to return 200 Okay pages and confuse the search engine.
Using the webmaster console can help you identify these problem
areas and facilitate the spidering and indexing of your site.

Query information and site analysis is available, giving you a
brief snapshot of what Google finds your site relevant for, as
well as how (and if) visitors are finding you. The entire
console is very user–friendly, even for the most novice of site
owners. Using the Webmaster tools can help your search engine
optimization campaign by enabling you to make the most out of
the vast information Google stores about your site.

One of the reasons that webmasters love the console is that
Google shows link data. Digging through the internal links that
Google knows about can assist you in strengthening your site's
architecture, ensuring that every page can be reached by a
spiderable text link. Even more exciting is the external link
data the tools provide. Want to know how many links to your site
Google actually knows about? The tools allow you to get a much
better look at your backlinks, though Google Engineer Matt Cutts
warns that you shouldn't assume that every link you see reported
counts for your site. Before this feature was included in the
console, the only way to get a glimpse at known links was to use
Google's link: search operator but that query was notorious for
returning just a sampling of links and no one could say how
large or small that sample might be. It's now possible to be
much more accurate about back links and that kind of knowledge
is vital to the success of your SEO project.

If you haven't already incorporated Google's Webmaster Tools
into your search engine optimization strategy, now is the time
to do so. Google has made it clear that they want webmasters to
pay attention to these metrics and there has never been a better
time for you to get involved. For more information, tips, tricks
and developments, check out the Official Google Webmaster
Central blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/).
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Susan Esparza (sesparza@bruceclay.com) is a senior writer at
Bruce Clay, Inc. (http://www.bruceclay.com).
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