Webmaster Tools is a free Google service to provide you with insight on how Google views your website. You can check what websites link to yours, check for any robot crawling errors, and check search queries used to visit your site.
To configure your website in Webmaster Tools, you’ll need access to update the meta tags in the index.html file. This will verify your account with Google and prove that you are responsible for your submitted website.
Becoming Recognized for the First Time
The first step to becoming recognized is to write an XML sitemap that lists your important web pages. You can submit your sitemap to Google and wait for them to access your website. Google may find your website with or without a sitemap, but it’s always better to create one and submit it.
Google may take a while to index your website. Just be patient and give their system some time. It may take months.
Configuring Your Website Settings with Google
You can choose between the www version of your website or the non-www version. It is recommended to choose the version your actual website configured to. For instance, when you type in www.yourdomain.com does it change to yourdomain.com? If both work separately, then you can be penalized for duplicate content. You can use an .htaccess file to rewrite your URLs properly.
You can also set up what type of audience you are targeting – local or global, the language, and the location.
Checking for Backlinks
If you search Google for “site:yourdomain.com”, you may find links to your website. These are called backlinks. However, if you don’t find any it either means you don’t have any or Google is not showing them. Webmaster Tools will show more backlinks than searching Google for them, so there is an inconsistency.
In the end, Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many backlinks they know about or which listed backlinks are valuable. It’s probably better not to focus on them so much as far as Webmaster Tools.
Checking for Search Crawling Errors
Google may come across problems crawling your website. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it and you just have to wait for Google to update it’s database. For example, if you remove a web page from your website it will return a 404 error (file not found). Again, give Google time to take off missing web page from their database.
Other times, your website may have errors that you should attend to. You may have a web page link in your sitemap that doesn’t exist or that is blocked by a robots.txt file.
If you want to request a URL to be removed, only request URLs that are confidential information that you do not want indexed. If you’re trying to take care of duplicate content or just don’t want Google to index a particular page, add a nofollow meta tag in the web page head and wait for Google to take care of the rest.
For more information about Google Webmaster Tools, you can use the Google Webmaster Tools Start Guide or take a look at the Webmaster Tools blog.