If you are dipping your toes into the SEO waters for the first time then setting up your website on Google Webmaster Tools should be part of your set-up plan. My top 5 reasons for using GWT:
1. Site Troubleshooting – Every website owner should ensure that the coded in their website is not hindering its crawling and ranking. GWT allows you to gain valuable feedback from Google. They will inform you of any issues it has with your site and they will even make HTML suggestions. This is very important information and should be accessed by all.
2. Indexing- Google treats every page of your site individually; therefore it is highly important that all the pages of your website are indexed. Only when your pages are indexed will they start appearing on Google search results. If you decided to target a new service and created a new landing page for this targeting keywords related to that service, then you want to make sure that Google will find your page.
3. Link Analysis – Inbound links are possibly the most important ranking factor. Gaining any information on the links pointing to your site is highly important. As Google is the most popular search engine, finding out what link records they have is very important. GWT can provide information on both your inbound links and your inner links.
4. Geographic Target – If your website is solely targeting Ireland and you have a .com TLD then your website is at a disadvantage on local search engines. Most people search through local search engines like Google.ie so it is important that you level the playing field. Ideally your website should have a .ie TLD but for many reasons this option is not always available to businesses. To fix this you can set a geographic target in GWT. Google will then associate your .com website with being from Ireland.
5. Indexing – If your web page is not indexed then that page cannot appear in the search results for the key phrases that it is targeting. It is in your interest to ensure that all your pages get indexed. This is especially important for very large sites. The best way to ensure this is through submitting XML sitemaps through GWT.
The search engine optimisation experts at JumpStart Marketing can help your site to be an online success story. Contact our SEO Agency today.


