I was asked today to explain what I actually use Google Webmasters Tools for and half-way through this rather one sided conversation I realised that I use it for quite a lot actually!

Here is a (brief for your benefit) summary of my favourite uses of Webmasters Tools for SEO:

Sitemaps
Allows us to tell Google which pages we want indexed & gives us the power to exclude pages if necessary.
Content Analysis
Highlights any duplicate content in meta titles & descriptions indexed by Google.

Web Crawl Diagnostic
Enables us to find out if Google is having difficulty crawling any pages, and therefore which pages cannot be indexed.

Canonical
Set preferred domain & therefore control which URL is displayed in search results.

Links
Shows links to your website from other pages on the Internet, in particular inbound links & anchor text.

Geographic Targeting
Allows us to specify the country we wish to target for search results.

Key Statistics
Lets us view Page Rank distribution throughout the site.

To find out more about how your site can use Google Webmasters Tools for SEO please contact 4Ps Marketing.

Tags: Google Tools, SEO Tools, Webmasters Tools

About the author: Stephanie Villegas

SEO Executive - Stephanie Villegas-Ross

Stephanie is an SEO Executive at 4Ps Marketing. She graduated from the University of Sussex with an English Literature degree. After leaving university Stephanie worked in offline Marketing, but soon sought out a position at 4Ps Marketing after craving the fast pace of online Marketing and the constant evolution of Social Media Optimisation.

Stephanie Villegas

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 11:53 am and is filed under SEO, google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.