Increase your site performance with Google Webmaster Tools

Most webmasters will be aware of the great range of free tools made available by Google to help:

• increase website visibility,
• find and resolve issues that might stop search engines and traffic reaching sites, and
• monitor site performance in terms of traffic and popular content.

Google Top Search Queries

Top Search Queries has been running for a while within the Webmaster Tools but this feature has recently been improved and updated by Google to include historical data.

This tool enables webmasters to analyse the actual search queries used by Google searchers to find pages on a website over time. This information is very valuable as you can use it to monitor whether new or existing site content is working for you and how search terms change daily, weekly, monthly or even 6 monthly (although please note that older data is not yet showing and will begin appearing over time).

There is also a new column showing which reports on the percentage each query result or click represents out of the top 20 queries. This can help you see how well the result or click volume is distributed in the top 20 searches.

Top Search Queries data is updated constantly and you can export it in .csv format to manipulate happily in a spreadsheet program.

Google SiteLinks

If you have used Google lately, you will probably have seen SiteLinks in operation. It is the function that displays extra links into different pages of a site below the main search result link for some larger websites. The extra sitelinks act like shortcuts to other relevant pages on the website.

While you are not able to tell Google which links appear in SiteLinks – it is an automated process that looks for relevance and fast navigation links – you can now tell Google if there are links you don’t want to appear. For example, you might have a page appearing in SiteLinks that is out of date, although ideally you don’t want to stop Google showing as many links as it can. Links to pages can be blocked for up to 90 days.

Have a look at the webmaster tools – there’s sure to be something that you can get started with straight away and if you’d like our help to set these features up for your site or to interpret the results, please contact us now.

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