Many who come to this site probably have their own website(s) and may do a lot of their own webmastering work. If you’re one of these, you’ll probably appreciate this quick introduction to Google’s Webmaster Tools. This powerful collection of Google tools analyzes your website and provides helpful feedback about it, from Google’s perspective. Learning what Google knows about your site and using it to improve your site will help you gain higher prominence in their search results.

The video below provides a general introduction to these tools and highlights two of the five sections, Diagnostics and Links. Below the movie are more details about all the goodies you’ll find at Google Webmaster Tools.

Google provides five areas to help webmasters improve their sites and their sites’ visibility in the Google search engine. These are Overview, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

The Overview section gives you a thumbnail sketch of your site, from Google’s perspective. It focuses on Indexing and Web Crawl Errors.

The Diagnostics section provides details on

• Web Crawl (errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site)
• Content Analysis (potential problems with site metadata, such as title and meta description information)
• Mobile Crawl (errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site created specifically for viewing on mobile cell phones).

The Statistics section provides information about:

• Top Search Queries (which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked)
• What Googlebot Sees (details about how the Googlebot sees your site)
• Crawl Stats (distribution info for your site, including the current PageRank for pages on your site)
• Index Stats (shows how your site is indexed by Google, including which pages are indexed, and which other sites point to your site)
• Subscriber Stats (If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.).

The Links section shows:

• Pages With External Links (which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites)
• Pages With Internal Links (which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site)
• Site Links (which links on your site have been identified as candidates for appearing directly in Google search results). The Pages With External Links tool will show you links from other sites to your site that don’t show up when you do a “links:www.yoursite.com” search. For example, when I did a search on Google just now for “links:www.thedoorway.org”, to see how many other sites are linking to this site, Google said only 5 were. The Index Stats page describes this report as “pages that link to your site’s front page”. But when I checked the Pages With External Links, Google reported 216 pages linking to this site! You can click on the number and see a clickable listing of each page linking to your site. This may include many pages on a particular site linking to yours, instead of just reporting that that one site points to your site. It’s interesting to see who’s linking to you.

The Sitemaps section reports any sitemaps on your site and also lets you add a sitemap to your site. A sitemap provides Google with additional information about your site. But Google doesn’t create it for you. You have to do it some other way. One way is to use the sitemap creation tool at ROR Sitemap Generator. You can also download a software tool from that page which will let you create a sitemap from your desktop.

The Tools section includes the following components:

• Analyze robots.txt (See whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make. Test against various Google user-agents, too.)
• Generate robots.txt (Interactively create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don’t want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don’t want crawled.)
• Manage Site Verification (See all verified owners of this site, and optionally reverify them.)
• Set Crawl Rate (See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired.)
• Set Geographic Target (Associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area.)
• Set Preferred Domain (Associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.)
• Enhanced Image Search (Enable Google’s enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google.)
• Remove URLs (Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal.)
• Gadgets (There is currently one gadget listed. That item will enable you to automatically add many of these tools to your Google home page.)

As you have seen above, Google is providing some awesome tools to help you learn about your site and improve it’s visibility in Google searches. Google Webmaster Tools is definitely one stop every webmaster should make. To learn more about these powerful tools, click here to take a tour of the Google Webmaster Tools.