How do I start?
All you need to start using webmaster tools is a free Google account. After you login you specify the url address of your site and the service generates a small piece of code that you put in your page to verify that you own the site. After the verification is done you will be able to use the provided tools.
When you start using webmaster tools the first thing you should do is provide Google with with a sitemap. The site map is a method of telling Google about the links on your site so its crawlers will be able to find all the pages on it. That way Google will be able to record your pages and show them on search results. You can find websites on the internet that will generate a sitemap for you or you can generate one yourself. If you have deployed your website using Joomla most of the SEF components such as OpenSef can generate the sitemap for you. If you own a Blog you can provide webmaster tools with your Blog's rss feed instead of a sitemap. Make sure though that you have set on your Blogging platform that each post should have its own webpage so there is at least one page link for that post.
If your site is new or if you have not submitted your site to Google for indexing you there wont be much data for it on webtools. This is normal though and after a couple of weeks time Google will index your website and it will start to generate data for it.
What can I do with Webmaster Tools?
The service's control panel is separated depending on the information you want to retrieve. Below is a list of the most important features offered by webmaster tools.
Overview. See when was the last time googlebot crawled your site to retrieve new information. See if everything is running smoothly (if the googlebot found any errors etc. ).
Diagnostics. See in detail how your site is indexed in google and any potential errors. If you want your website to be accessible from mobile phones as well you can find information here to help you optimize it for this purpose. You can view any problems that might occur with your site's meta tags and potential problems with some of the links on your site (dead links for example).
Top search queries. Find out with what queries people find your site on Google
Crawl stats. Find out the ranking of your site in Google.
Subscriber stats. Find out how many users have subscribed to your rss feed.
What googlebot sees. See how the googlebot views your site. This is very helpful for optimizing your site for search engines.
Index stats. Find out what pages Google has indexed from your site, what other pages link to your site and more.
Links. Extensive overview of all internal and external links of your website and potential problems.
SiteMaps. View and upload sitemaps for your website and view any errors associated with them.
Manage site verification. Set other owners for your site.
Manage Robot access. Set the permissions for you site's directories;which folders will be accessible to which bots.
Set geographic target. If your site is targeted to a specific country you can set that here.
Remove Urls. If you want any uls to be excluded by the search results or you do not want the googlebot to try to index them you an set that here.
Set crawl rate. Set how fast the googlebot will visit your site to try and find new content.
The information offered by webmaster tools is very important since it helps you understand how your website is perceived by Google. This will help you spot potential problems and optimize your site. Understanding how your website is indexed and improving the way it is indexed will place you better on the web. If you would ask me how this service would help you with your website I would say that it helps you examine the tree in terms of the forest.
