How Webmaster Tools Can Boost Your Practice’s Website

Webmaster tools, created by Google, comprise diagnostic tools for your practice’s website. Similar to a car engine, webmaster tools ensure your site is running smoothly under the hood.

Well-oiled websites rank higher than those websites wrought with errors.

While most of the Webmaster tools are pretty technical to the newbie, there are several reasons why each web master, or website owner, should have an account. Here are the steps you can take to create a website and easily transition to becoming its web master.
 

1. Registration: First, register a new site directly with Google. Once you’ve created a Google account, sign up for Webmaster tools. You may register your new website by simply submitting the URL (remember, this is the www.yourwebsite.com). This tells the Google bots where to find your new site.

While it is true that this step is not really necessary and you will be found by the search engines...eventually. There is no guarantee, however, if, or when, this will happen. Go ahead and register...it’s free. There are similar processes with Bing and Yahoo, but Google remains the 800 pound gorilla. Google is the easiest to make submissions.
 

2. Index Your Site: To ensure that Google is aware of every page of your site, submit a copy of your site map directly to Google. A site map is basically a table of contents for your site and it tells Google where to find each and every page of your website. This ensures that your entire website gets catalogued. Sites that are not registered, sites that are not indexed or have missing “pages” basically do not exist and your site won’t get ranked. 

3. Use diagnostic tools: There are a variety of “checks” that webmaster tools can run on your website to maximize your SEO (search engine optimization). All function differently and give a variety of information. Webmaster tools can check how easily the robots can “crawl” through your site, checking internal hyperlinks and errors in your SEO (e.g. missing certain key tags or titles). The diagnostic tools help you to make sure that the website is running well behind the scenes. Most errors are easy to fix.
 

Why bother? These tools help make sure your SEO is maximized for your site. Sites containing internal link errors, pages missing, pages that don’t exist, etc. all hamper your overall SEO ranking. Low SEO rankings depress your website rankings (how high your site ranks on a search engine results page).

4. Consider keywords: A last reason to use webmaster tools is to see how the search engines see your page. For instance, it can tell you what keywords are predominantly associated with your site. For instance, my retinaeyedoctor.com, is a site about retinal disease. Keywords ranking highly for my site; retina, macula, macular degeneration, eye disease.
 

Bingo! Webmaster tools tell me that my site is known for retinal diseases...and that’s my goal. Webmaster tools give me the knowledge that my site ranks for the intended keywords and that my SEO and content is spot on.

Learn more about Randall Wong and our other contributing bloggers here.