Google Webmaster Tools

It's been crazy lately! Hockey season ended, I went on spring break (home and San Francisco) and then went to the American Marketing Association International Collegiate Conference in New Orleans! Because marketing is entering the Golden Age of technological advancement, I’m going to talk about Google Webmaster Tools and how they will be useful for our client’s digital marketing efforts in the future.

Google Webmaster Tools can be very helpful when running a website. Image from: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-webmaster-tools-now-tracks-indexed-urls-specific-sections-website-including-https/96749/

To start using Google Webmaster Tools, one first has to sign up and verify the account. There are four ways to verify that the account is really you: by uploading a file to your server, adding a meta tag to your HTML, adding a new DNS record, or by using your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account. There are a lot of different things that can be helpful with the webmaster tools. Once you have signed up you will have access to your site’s traffic referral sources, like pages that link to yours, and your internal links. You will also be able to see what search queries match with your site, and which search queries people will be searching for when they see your site come up in the results. For our client’s digital marketing efforts, I would say that using Google Webmaster Tools would be a great choice.

A very important part of making sure your site is working properly and that your users computers and information are not being compromised by hackers and malware, and the Google Webmaster Tools help you to track anything that could be malicious on your site. In addition, you must update your software regularly, so sign up for any mailing list that your website management tools utilizes to make security announcements so that you know when there is new software available or a new bug to watch out for. It is also possible to set up Google Alerts to notify you when there is a spam-related keyword detected on your site. There are also user-generated spam issues that can come about from forum posts and comments on content by users. We’ve all seen the annoying social media comments and tweets from spammers where there are twenty in a row with a link and some eye-popping caption or title. Users may be inclined to click on these spam comments and be sent to a harmful or undesirable web page. The easy way to get around this is to create a spam policy to protect your site from these spammers. It would be good for our client (who’s site is an online gift registry in which you can categorize and make your own items with links to product pages, or any page really) to make sure that a good spam policy is in place for all wish list products. It would be very easy for anybody to link to a malicious site through the product pages.

There is also information on how to improve your site’s HTML and you can get suggestions on how to do this, as well as how to removed a page or site from Google Search results if you do not wish for it to show up on a search results page because it is under construction or old. You can also submit a sitemap to help search engines with their crawling and categorizing. I would suggest that our client would submit a sitemap so that Google could easier crawl and categorize the website.