64. What is Google Webmaster?
When you hear the word webmaster you might think of it as a very technical position. It need not be, a webmaster is a person who maintains a website, makes sure domains and web servers contracts and renewals are done, troubleshoots problems with the website, in some cases updates content and ensures that a website meets hygiene norms. Thus webmaster can be a person who keeps keeps an even the website and ensure all issues are addressed immediately and correctly. A web programmer, web designer can be a webmaster too.
To ensure that a webmaster is able to get clues and insights into a websites performance and issues Google provides a tool called the Google Webmaster. The webmaster tools provide you with vital site data, site diagnostic etc for ensuring a healthy and a Search Engine friendly website.
The Google Webmaster tools are a free service offered by Google to webmasters to check the status of sites and to optimise the same. Introducing the Google Webmaster tool was a part of marketing efforts by Google to promote their services. The most important use of google webmaster is when it comes to search engine optimisation. This is a great tool for seo's along with google analytics.
As mentioned above the webmaster tools allow you to access data and info about the crawling, indexing, errors, how to fix errors etc as stated below
Once log in, you see the real treat the webmaster tool. The dashboard shows an overview of:
1. Crawl Errors
2. URL Errors
3. Site Errors
4. Status of DNS, Server Connectivity & Robots.txt
5. Overview of # of Queries (plus clicks and impressions)
6. Sitemaps (including submitted URLs and indexed URLs)
7. Status of Website micro data structure
8. Status of inbound links - who links, to which page and using what anchor text
9. Status of keyword performance on search engine results pages
10. Shows 404 page not found alerts
11. Sends malware alerts
12. There is an interesting links disavow tool which can aid SEO in a big way
13. Google analytics and google webmaster integration helps in better data availability
14. There is a labs feature here too which can show some interesting inputs for optimising the website.
