How to use Google webmaster tools?

Before, diving into the depth, it is very important to understand the definition of Google webmasters tools. Then we will learn how to use Google webmaster tools step by step. In this webmaster guide, you will get the complete details of how to set up Google webmaster tools.

Note: Also read how to submit website in Yandex Webmaster and Bing Webmaster Tools.

What Is Google webmaster tools?

Google webmaster tools or Search console is a free Google web application which is mainly used by the webmasters to monitor the health and performance of the website.

This tool comes with many inbuilt features by which you can easily track the website’s performance, Google search index status, technical status update, and also information about search traffic. Overall this tool can be referred to as the doctor of the website because it tracks each and every information about the website. Also, it should be noted the tool is also known as Google Search Console.

How to set up Google webmaster tools

As in the explanation above you might have understood the definition Google search console and its importance. So today, I will assist and guide you on how to set up Google webmaster tools in very easy and simple steps. So let us start step by step tutorials to understand how to use Google webmaster tools to improve SEO and website performance properly.

Step by step Google webmaster guide

Step 1:

First of all, go to the site https://search.google.com/search-console/about

And click the start know button and then log in with your Gmail account.

After logging in with Gmail you will be redirected into the first page of Google Search Console. Just add your website property in the box given in the page and then click to add property.

Step 2: Dashboard

After clicking to add a property, thereby you will be redirected to a Google search console page which will look like this. This is the google webmaster dashboard or new search console.

In short, this is the page where you would be getting all the information related to the website. In addition to this never forget to verify all the versions of the website that is www and non-www version of the website. Otherwise, as a rule, Google will treat all the version of the website different.

Step 3: Setting the preferred domain to avoid duplicate content

After you have verified all the versions of the website, in general, you have to set up the preferred domain. That is out of 4 domains you have to select a single domain in order to prevent problems caused by duplicate content appearing on multiple sites. This is done using canonicalization technique.

Step 4: Setting up the preferred domain in Google webmaster console

In order to set the preferred domain, go to the older version of Google search console or webmaster tool. After that click your preferred domain and site gear and henceforth click on-site setting and at last select your preferred domain and save it.

Step 5: Setting the preferred domain through .htaccess

If you are a technical person then you can also set the preferred domain through Cpanel by updating the .htaccess file. This is one of my favorite ways of setting the preferred domain.

In addition to that, if you are not so much technical then you can also use canonicalization log in the head section. As an example, you need to insert the link or also you can use WordPress insert and header Plugins if you have a website made in WordPress.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/>

Step 6: Submitting sitemap in Google webmaster tools

In order to properly index web pages in Google search engine, it’s essential to submit a sitemap in search console. A sitemap is basically an XML file which contains information about the pages and content available on the website. To crawl the site in search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing sitemap is required.

There are various free tools available on the internet from which you can easily generate a sitemap and can use it. If you are using WordPress then you can go for Yoast Seo plugin to generate a sitemap. Always remember, a sitemap improves the crawling of the site.

Step 7: Overview of the features of the Google webmaster console

Google Search Console page is divided into two columns. The left the output or result when the respective tools are clicked in the left column.

Google Search Console page is divided into two columns. The left column displays the list of tools and the right columns display the output or result when the respective tools are clicked in the left column.

Let us analyze the main features of Google search console.

1. Overview:

The overview tab is a default tab in Google search console. It has three main areas. These are performance, coverage, and enhancement. It shows the overall performance of the website. In brief, a quick description of the website.

2. Performance: 

The performance tab of the Google webmaster console shows how many total clicks, impression, and CTR the website has got. In addition to this, it also displays the average position of the site in the search result.

3. URL Inspection:

In order to fetch website or any URL in Google webmaster console which are not indexed or submitted, use this section. Just you need to enter the URL and hit enter. If the URL is indexed then you do not need to worry. If it is not indexed then you need to request for indexing. After this Google will take some time and will index the URL.

4.Coverage:

In the coverage section, you will find the basic reports of the web pages on your website. It is divided into four segments- error, valid with the warning, valid and excluded. You should try to have no pages with errors and warnings. If there is any error it will be displayed in the error segment and it should be removed as soon as possible to improve the performance of the website.

5.Sitemap: 

Here, in this section, you can add a new site map. If you are using WordPress then I would suggest you to use Yoast Seo plugin to generate a sitemap. Otherwise, you can search for free sitemap generator tool in Google.

6. Enhancement:

The enhancement section basically shows an error if pages are mobile-friendly or not. In older version of search console the coverage, performance and mobile usability was covered under the section which was known as search analytics.

7. Security & Manual Action:

Google is very intelligent; it can easily detect if something spammy happens on the site.

If you are doing something wrong or going out of the Google’s guideline with your website such as black hat SEO then you will be warned by Google through the notification and it will ask to do some manual action to fix it.

If not done your website might be blocked by Google or might be demoted in the search engine result page. So, I would suggest you not to do black hat SEO to optimize your website.

If in this section you see no notification that means there is no problem in your site and if you see any notification then immediate action must be taken to resolve the issue.

Also, if there are any problems regarding security you will be informed in this section through notifications.

8.    Links:

This section of Google webmaster shows you how many external and internal links your webpage is pointing to. So if you want to check how many your website has got external links then you should click to the links section of the new Google search console and can easily check the external links of your website.

Also, you can examine how many internal links you have for your website. Even you can easily remove the bad links pointing to your website using a technique called Google Disavow.

So if you want to check how many your website has got external links then you should click to the links section of the new Google search console and can easily check the external links of your website.

Also, you can examine how many internal links you have for your website. Even you can easily remove the bad links pointing to your website using a technique called Google Disavow.

9.Setting:

Under the setting tab of the search console you can check the status about the ownership verification and who is the authorized person.

10. Go to the old version:

If you are better adapted in the old version of the Google Search console then click to this section you can easily go the older version of the Google webmaster console.

Conclusion

In brief, I would like to conclude that Google Webmaster console or new search console is one of the best tools available on the internet which you can use to track all the vital information about your website.

In addition to this, if you are really concern about organic traffic and want to perform better in search results pages of Google then this tool can help you to achieve your goal if you follow all the rules of the webmaster. So, you should utilize the tool to the full capacity to enhance your website performance.

Also, follow all the recommendation of Google to fit in their requirements.

If you have any doubt regarding how to use Google webmaster tools then you can email me or can provide me with any feedback through email. Please keep reading the blog to acquire knowledge and I will keep working hard to provide you with more information and knowledge related to Google analytics, webmaster, SEO, and social media marketing, etc.

Bing Webmaster tools

 

You all are familiar with Google webmaster tools. This tool is generally used to track the performance of the website. Similar to Google Search console there is another tool that should be taken into consideration, that is the Bing webmaster tool. This tool helps the website to get indexed in Bing Search Engine. So, today in this article I will guide you on how to add your website in Bing webmaster tools.    

Recommended:  Learn how to submit URL to Yandex Webmaster.

How to submit your URL in Bing webmaster tools

First of all, to submit URL in Bing webmaster tools you have to login into Bing account. After logging in you will see a dashboard similar to the given below.

Bing Web Master Dashboard

In the dashboard, you will see the option named “Add a Site”. Here in the box, you have to insert the URL of the website and then click to ADD button to add your website to submit URL in Bing.

Bing Webmaster Tool-Add URL

Once you add URL to Bing then you would be asked to add details related to the website like sitemap, ownership details, etc. If you have not created a sitemap of your website you can easily create using SEO Yoast plugin or create using Google XML sitemap plugin. After that, you can easily submit sitemap URL in the info page.

Bing webmaster tools verification

Once you have submitted all the details you will be redirected to Bing webmaster tools verification page. Here you will get three options to verify your website. These options are these

Option 1: Place an XML file on the Web server

To place an XML file on Web Server you have to download the XML file. After downloading the XML upload the file in Public_html (https://www.beingoptimist.com/BingSiteAuth.Xml) folder. Hence, click the verify button to verify.

Option 2: Copy and paste a <meta> tag in your default web page

As a rule, the Meta code should be inserted in the <head> section of the default page.

Option 3:Add a CNAME record to DNS to verify website

You can choose any of them and can verify your website in Bing webmaster.

bing verify

After Bing webmaster tools verification for the website, you will be redirected to the dashboard which will look like this.

Understanding Bing webmaster tools features

Till now we have submitted and verified our website in Bing webmaster tool. In the next step, we will learn to configure the setting to maximize the performance of our website.

Multiple sitemap submission in Bing webmaster tools:

You can create the sitemap for videos and images as well and can submit to tell Bing about the structure of your website. You can submit sitemaps to Bing directly using this feature. Submitting a sitemap assist Bing to see your content and crawl it for indexing.

Submit URLs:

The Submit URLs feature of the Bing Webmaster allows you to submit a URL from your website directly into the Bing index. If you have vital, latest content, use this tool to submit it quickly. This tool is restricted to 50 submissions per month, at a rate of 10 per day. These restrictions apply to the domain level.

Ignore These URL Parameters 

This property allows you to define query parameters for Bing’s crawler to ignore. For example, if you own http://example.com/ and use this page to define the parameter “abc” be ignored, the URL http://example.com/home?abc=123 will be seen as http://example.com/home. This means that URLs having the query string parameter “abc” will have that parameter removed prior to indexing. The benefits include: preventing redundancy content in the Bing index, avoiding having a page’s index value split between multiple URL variations, and avoiding unnecessary site bandwidth usage by the search crawler.

Crawl Control (Bingbot Crawl Control)

This property allows you to directly control the rate at which Bingbot crawls your website. You can tell Bingbot to crawl quickly or slower and ordain this at individual times during the day. This would allow you to limit Bingbot’s activities when your visitors are on your website, assisting you to manage bandwidth more effectively. Your robots.txt file would take precedence over the information from this feature. You can also click and drag in the graph to make your own custom “crawl pattern” for Bingbot.

Deep Links

This property of the Bing allows you to block a URL from showing as a deep link in Bing search results. This block will cease after 90 days which can be stretched out. You can set up the block to apply to all result URLs or to be limited to a specific result URL as well as for a specific country/region.

Block URLs

This property allows you to block a URL from appearing in the Bing search results. This block will remain active for 90 days.  If you want to remove any directory or categories or tags from Bing Search Result pages then this feature will help you to perform this task. You can stop indexing of any web pages or directory on your site using Block URLs section.

This manual removal remains active for 90 days and you will get an alert notification in your email 8 days before the completion of 90 days, so you can decide if you wish to renew the block in Bing’s search engine.

Disavow Links

You can use the Disavow links tool to submit domain URLs that may contain links to your site that seem “spammy” or appear to be from unnatural or low-quality sites.

Geo-Targeting

This setting in the webmaster allows you to specify a geographic target for your entire domain, subdomain, directory, or even a single page on your website. Bing uses this data as an additional suggestion to other signals to determine how your pages appear in search results.

In addition to this, Bing webmaster tools also allow you to put the country audience for the entire website or for the portion of your website.

Users

BWT has one very interesting property, using the user property you can add as many users for your website. The webmaster tool supports three roles. These are Read Only, Read/Write and Administrator. I will not go deep on this topic. So you can use these features to assign different users according to your requirements.

There are much more things which we can do with the Bing webmaster tool to enhance our search engine visibility in Bing search engine, but to keep this topic short and explanatory, I would stop it now and would cover the next part in the forthcoming post. For now, if you have not submitted your website to Bing webmaster tools, it is the right time to go ahead and do the requisite. If you have any questions regarding the topic, feel free to ask in the comments below.

If you find this Bing webmaster tool guide informative and explanatory, do not forget to share it on your favorite social network and subscribe to SMS newsletter for more such updates.

 

In order to track the performance of the website and to give more visibility, it is important to add your website in Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools. In addition to these webmaster tools, there is another tool named Yandex Webmaster which is very popular in Russia.

Similar to the other search consoles you can also submit or add your website to the Yandex search Console for better organic performance and in Russia.

Reason why you should add your website to Yandex Webmaster

Usually, Yandex webmaster is identical to Google Webmaster tools with many similar features which allow site owners to monitor indexing status and optimize visibility of their website in Yandex Search.

Furthermore, features, like submitting and examining a sitemap or generating a robots.txt, are quite similar to Google Webmaster Tools while there are few more features in Yandex webmaster which makes it unique and good for SEO.

In addition to this, it is one of the leading search engines in Russia, so we should not underestimate the power of this search engine because it will be very productive for increasing the visibility of the page in the search result page.

How to register and Login To Webmasters Yandex

Let us follow the step by step procedures to add URL to Yandex webmaster tools. So, Here we go

Step 1: First of all, go to Yandex Webmaster Tools

Step 2: Not  Registered User

If you are a new user then you need to register with Yandex. Also, you can log in to the account using your social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter or Google.

Step3: Click the plus sign button to add your website in Yandex Webmaster

So after logging into the account click to “Add a Site” button to submit your website URL. As for example:

Step 4: Type your website’s URL in the box and click yellow “Add button” to continue

Step 5: Copy and paste the verification code for Yandex-verification.

Therefore after adding your website URL in Yandex Webmaster, you have to verify your website so that the webmaster understands that you are the authorized person.

Hence, using any of the three options available in webmaster tools such as Meta tag, HTML File, DNS Record and WHOIS you can perform Yandex verification for your website.

Here I will be showing you the easiest way to verify your website if you are using a WordPress CMS. If you are using WordPress just you have to copy the code given under double quotation mark and then follow below steps.

Step 6: Log in to your WordPress website

Login to your WordPress site and install the Yoast SEO plugin and then activate it, After activating go to the “General” setting and click to “Webmaster Tools” Tab.

Step 7: Paste the code under ‘Yandex Webmaster Tools

Under Yoast SEO webmaster tools tab, you will see the list of tools verification boxes such as Baidu, Bing, Google, and Yandex verification code. Just under Yandex verification code paste the code.

Step 8: Now Click save changes

Step 9: Now Go back to Yandex Webmaster Tools and click ‘Check’

Congratulation! Your website is a part of the Yandex Webmaster Tools family.

Step 10: Alternative options to verify website

You can also verify your website by downloading the HTML file and then uploading it directly on the server’s “Public_html” folder. Another way of verifying the website is to copy the Meta Tag or Html file code and then insert it within the head tag i.e. <head>Code Here</head>

Submitting Sitemap in Yandex

To submit a sitemap in Yandex webmaster tools basically, you have to click to the “indexing >sitemap files” section and submit your sitemap URL.

Conclusion:

Here my goal was just to explain to you the easiest options of how to verify your website to Yandex Webmaster Tools. Amongst all the options the easiest way to add URL in Yandex Webmaster is using Yoast SEO plugin.

 If you are technically good at coding and server handling you can skip the step 5, 6, 7 and 8 and can start the verifying process from step 10 onward.

There are many features in Yandex webmaster tools that cannot be explained in one go. In the next article I will explain to you all the features of the tools step by but before ending I would like to give you an overview of the features:

Yandex provides the following features to Webmasters:

1. Inspect the search queries that show your website in the search results.
2. You can easily check the website’s status in the Yandex search engine like how many pages have been listed and excluded.
3. Mobile-friendliness of your site.
4. You can also check the site security and diagnose the site for other possible problems.
5. You can manage your site structure using Yandex Webmaster Tools.

At last, I would like, to remind you that you should have a Yandex account associated with Webmaster Yandex in order to submit URL to Yandex Webmaster Tool. In addition to this, they also need a phone number as a part of their Yandex verification to know that data is submitted by a real person.

Conclusion:

Here my goal was just to explain to you the easiest options of how to verify your website to Yandex Webmaster Tools. Amongst all the options the easiest way to add URL in Yandex Webmaster is using Yoast SEO plugin.

If you are technically good at coding and server handling you can skip the step 5, 6, 7 and 8 and can start the verifying process from step 10 onward. There are many features in Yandex webmaster tools that cannot be explained in one go. In the next article, I will explain to you all the features of the tools step by but before ending. I would like to give you an overview of the features:

Yandex provides the following features to Webmasters:

1. Inspect the search queries that show your website in the search results.
2. You can easily check the website’s status in the Yandex search engine like how many pages have been listed and excluded.
3. Mobile-friendliness of your site.
4. You can also check the site security and diagnose the site for other possible problems.
5. You can manage your site structure using Yandex Webmaster Tools.

At last, I would like, to remind you that you should have a Yandex account associated with Webmaster Yandex in order to submit URL to Yandex Webmaster Tool. In addition to this, they also need a phone number as a part of their Yandex verification to know that data is submitted by a real person.