Lesson Two – Google Webmaster Central

Google Webmaster Central will enable you to kick start the SEO process and will also enable you to satisfy many of the basic requirements of SEO.

Incidentally, if you are beginning to think everything is a bit Google centric, its because in the UK (and most of Europe) Google is dominant. Also by optimising for Google you’ll find you are optimising for the other search engines by default; Google being the most exacting for SEO. Later in the series we will address some specific international issues though and specifically look at other important search engines you need to be aware of.

So, to Google Webmaster Central (GWC). This will enable you to get recognised by Google, ensure all your pages get spidered, and give you lots of information about how Google sees your site. Its only a slight exaggeration to say it allows you to have a one to one conversation with Googlebot.

There’s a useful link I will make you aware of in a moment which overviews all of the functionality available via GWC. I suggest you don’t use this link right now but come back to it after going through the rest of the lesson. Here it is:-

http://www.google.com/webmasters/edu/quickstartguide/index.html

If you go through the 10 pages in this ‘quick start guide’ you’ll get to understand what it covers. One word of warning though, don’t sweat over it if there are bits of you don’t fully understand. I’ll cover the essential bits in detail for you.

So the first thing, if you haven’t already, is to register your site with GWC, go to:-

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

and ‘sign in to webmaster tools’

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You’ll see you need a Google account (gmail address) so if you haven’t already got one you need to create one.

Once you have done this go back to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and sign in. The first task is to add your site and, very importantly, verify you site. This shows that you are the owner of the site. Google gives you some code to add to your site and once this has been done you can access all the GWC functionality.

The essential things to do via GWC are as follows (I suggest you do all of this between now and the next lesson in two weeks):-

Firstly, under ‘Settings’ do the following:-

1. Set the geographic target date to reflect where you want rankings from….

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This is only necessary if you have a neutral top level domain (.com, .info. , .net etc). If you have a .co.uk or other country specific domain (eg www.yourdomain.de) Google knows where you want rankings from. If its neutral Google will assume you want rankings from where your site is hosted (eg if its hosted in the USA that’s where you’ll get rankings) so its important you give Google this information.

2. Still under ‘settings’ set the ‘preferred domain’ and ‘crawl rate’ as I have done in the screenshot above.

3. Under ‘sitemaps’ you will need to submit one. On this page Google gives you the detail of how to do this…

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This will ensure all your pages get spidered and included in the Google database.

One other check to perform – under ‘tools’ you’ll see reference to robots.txt files. This is a file that resides on the server which tells Google which pages to look at and which to ignore. You may want to check with the tools available here what is included in the robots.txt file. (use ‘analyze robots.txt’) Sometimes we find people (or their website designers) have inadvertently excluded important pages of their site. It may also be that you want to exclude certain pages – eg terms and conditions. So familiarise yourself with these options and make sure everything is in order before we move on.

These are the essentials, and over and above this play around with the other functionality to your hearts content and put right any other issues Google has with your site – like broken links for example.

We’ll come back to GWC several times later if its necessary to troubleshoot any ranking issues.

That’s it. Familiarise yourself well with GWC. We’ll introduce you to more tools at relevant times. Again, call or email if you have any problems (01928 788100 ; jan@janklin.com)