Manage Your Website in Google Webmaster Tools: Part 3

Google Webmaster Tools now known as Google Search Console.

Think about few weeks back, before you start with Google Webmaster Tools series here. Do you believe you have learnt something new and being even more familiar with Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) than before? If you did, at least for some extent, you can be proud of yourself :) Not at all?! Don't worry, it's never too late and you can come up with all the questions via comments. Follow details with GWMT and you will get to know it better. May be you can teach me after all ;)

Last time we have been talking about how you can review health status of your blog or website using Google Webmaster Tools and you must pay attention there if you care the security of your site. If you missed it, read Manage Your Website in Google Webmaster Tools: Part 2. Now we can move on to the next section - Traffic.

Traffic

Who doesn't love more traffic to their blogs or websites? However this isn't about building traffic, but you can use the data available here for your benefit. Here in Traffic section, Google will reveals how your content performs in Google search and due to Google's long-term relationship with backlinks, you will able to explore through backlinks identified by Googlebots too. Let's go for details and see what GWMT offers you here.

Search Queries

Would you like to know how content on your site performs in Google search? What content helps bring more traffic to your site via Google? Google knows best about what happens on Google. GWMT offers you information about search queries that returns or displays your content in search results.

You can find a table similar to below in GWMT under Search Queries which reflects data relates to your site. Let's take a look at below table and information it contains to have a better understanding.

Queries - Basically queries are terms someone enters into Google search box to perform a search. As the table depicts, in a specific period of time, Google search has been showing content of your site in search results for 4,003 user search queries.

Impressions - Impressions are number of pages from your site, being displayed in Google search results. Here around 370,000 impressions were occurred for 4,003 queries.

Clicks - Clicks are what matters most for you. Isn't it? Clicks refers to the number of times that users landed on your site from Google search results. As table reflects, around 27,000 times, users were landed on your site via Google search results for the same period of time.

Now that was a summary of search queries for a specific period of time. Further, you can dig deeper into available data and find what kind of information searchers were seeking for. Obviously, you will find very useful clues to improve your site.

If you would like to explore each query in detail, just click on the query you need. Pretty interesting information is here. You will be able to find what pages of your site being displayed in search results for that query, and what positions or rankings held in search results. If there is any duplicate content existing in your site, you can find them here too. But it would be time consuming. How many of your pages being displayed in first page of Google search results? Find out here.

Here's a helpful video explaining how you can use GWMT search query information to improve your site. You can find the opportunity hidden in statistics ;)

Links to Your Site

Aren't you careful about who you are linking to and who links to you most? Links is an important factor  to determine the popularity of a page when it comes to SEO. You can recall the post about Google PageRank. If you are wondering where to find all sorts of incoming links of your site, now you just found a one place to rely on.

As Googlebots crawl your pages and pages of other sites, it lists any information regarding links here if they are related to your site. However you may not find all the details about links, but most of them which is sufficient to conduct research and review processes.

Who Links the Most

Do you need to find backlinks pointing to your blog or website? Check out under Who links the most title. It shows you the top domains link back to your site and clicking on More link will reveal the rest of domains too.

Click on each domain to reveal details about backlinks coming from each domain. It lists pages of your site being linked from referring site including the number of links. Wanna find more? You can click on each listed pages again to find specific pages linked from the referring domain. That's where you find exact pages where backlinks are coming from.

Your Most Linked Content

While reviewing who links the most, you can review the most linked pages of yours under Your most linked content title. Clicking on each link will shows you the domains linking to your listed page. Go ahead and click referring domains to find exact pages linking to the specific page.

How Your Data is Linked

Now you got to know who links to your site most, to what content of yours and from what pages. You can get to know what texts were using in links to refer your blog or website under How your data is linked title.

Let's imaging someone links to my blog as below,

<a href="http://www.mayura4ever.com">Mayura</a>

The text Mayura is what we talk about here. The text uses my name but refers to my blog. Got it? Now check out what texts were used by others to refer your site too.

Internal Links

Internal links are links circulate within your site. Simply, links on your site that links to pages within your own site. Internal linking is a great way to keep your visitors more time on your site. Also helpful in SEO as links is a signal considered in PageRank algorithm. But they need to be relevant and helpful to the topic.

There were incidents that some folks were trying to make use of internal links to boost PageRank of a page too. But finally get penalized. Just DO IT RIGHT.

Once you land here, you can find list of pages referred by most internal links with the count of internal links pointing to each pages. Clicking on each listed links will reveal the pages referring to that link.

If you need to find internal links to a specific page on your site, you can enter rest of the URL in given text field and click Find to view internal links pointing to that page.

It's very helpful in exploring internal links, and to find if you have missed any link to mention or already linked with irrelevant content. Anyway it depends on the purpose. But there's opportunity to review internal links easily.

Enjoy :-)