Google Webmaster Central

Google Webmaster Central is a page with links to various Google services designed to help webmasters make Google-friendly websites. You'll find links to the following:

- Site status wizard is a simple tool which allows you check whether your site is being indexed by Google, and when Googlebot last visited your homepage.

- Webmaster tools (including Sitemaps) leads to an array of useful features which are discussed at greater length below.

- Submit your content to Google takes you to a page where you can submit books, videos and other content to Google for users to search and retrieve.

- Google's blog for webmasters is an interesting blog with all sorts of up-to-the-minute information about Google's indexing techniques.

- Google's discussion group for webmasters is an extremely useful page where you can get your questions answered, as well as looking up past questions and answers in the archive.

- Webmaster help center is basically a detailed FAQ about optimising your site for Google and everything related.

Google Webmaster Tools

To begin using the Webmaster Tools, you need to have submitted and verified your website, in order to prove that you are its owner. Verification is performed either by adding a specified META tag to your index page, or uploading an html page with a specified title.

You will then be prompted to create an XML sitemap. This will make your site easier for Google to crawl. If you use Wordpress, you try out the Google sitemap generator for Wordpress. This plug-in creates an XML sitemap every time you add a post to your Wordpress blog, and automatically pings Google and Yahoo! in the process.

Google will take a few hours to download and crawl your sitemap. After that, you will have access to detailed information and statistics about your website, which can prove extremely useful. There is diagnostic information, telling you when Googlebot has had any problems indexing your site. The statistics section has a wide range of different statistics, including information about what keywords people used to find your site, and where you rank in the Google results for those keywords. The links section shows all links to and within your site. Finally, there is sitemap information.

By Iain Ford

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