SEO Blog

Webmaster Tools, just like a good analytics package, can help you to see your site through the eyes of a search engine. It won’t tell you when if your design is ugly or content is poor, but it will give you a heads up when errors start to creep in.

So, on the day that Bing released their revised Webmaster Tools programme, I thought it would be worth discussing some of the benefits for your site and SEO efforts.

Crawl Errors

A crawl error occurs when a search engine spider is unable to follow a link in your site properly or encounters some other form of coding cul-de-sac. This data is reported directly from the spiders themselves, so it’s difficult to ignore and should be acted upon with reasonable host.

As I’ve covered previously, broken links provide a couple of significant problems. Firstly, visitors won’t be able to visit the intended page – not good for retention. Secondly, search engines view this as unprofessional and it can waste valuable time crawling your site – not good for SEO. So by identifying these, you can resolve the issues and make sure your site doesn’t suffer as a consequence.

Readable Content

Not everything on your site’s pages can be read by a search engine spider. Images and flash completely elude these crawlers and so, therefore, does any content contained within them. Google Webmaster Tools can show you what the Googlebot sees, helping you to identify any areas where content may be a bit thin.

Backlinks

Again, Google’s package offers interesting reading in this instance. Before Caffeine was launched your backlinks might have seemed far lower than you had expected. Now however, this has been rectified. With all links now being counted (not just the strongest and most obvious ones) huge increases can be tracked in the linking profile of your site(s).

Bing Webmaster Tools on the other hand simply offers the more traditional site links, without the thousands of weak additions, usually from sites scraping content. Whatever figure you’re working from though, it is a good metric for measuring your site’s growth, particularly as links provide a huge amount of your overall strength.

Sitemaps

You’ll be able to submit your Sitemap to Google via their Webmaster Tools platform. This can prove to be invaluable when it comes to indexing your pages. Remember, the more information the search engines have about your site and its layout, the easier they can crawl it and the better your chances are of improving your rankings.

Indexed Pages

Following neatly on from the last point, the number of pages indexed within the site is also important. If there are some pages that aren’t getting indexed, then invariably those same pages also won’t be ranking in the search engines. So by reviewing indexed pages you can understand how much your site is growing and identify any issues that the spiders are having indexing pages.

It should all be fairly straightforward and the various codes required can be sourced from the search engines themselves. It sits within the HTML of your site and won’t appear to visitors, so you don’t need to worry about it interfering with your on-page content.

Essentially when it comes to developing a website you need to have as much data available to you as possible. How you choose to use it is entirely up to you, but certainly if you want to really give your site the best possible chance it is advisable to have Webmaster Tools (both Bing and Google…Yahoo also if you choose) included alongside analytics. This should give you plenty of insight.