Google Webmaster Tools is not nearly as popular as Google Analytics – but it should be.

Setting up Webmaster Tools slightly easier than setting up Google Analytics (and they have just recently become linked so you don’t even have to set them up separately), and it provides a lot of useful information that is not found in Google Analytics such as:

  • crawl errors
  • keywords (Google shows you what keywords are most prominent)
  • search impressions vs. clicks (allowing you to optimize titles and descriptions)

and most importantly:

  • what keywords you are getting impressions from in search results and what you are ranking for these keywords

This last bullet is a gold mine because it shows you what phrases are pulling up your site the most and allows you to pick the ones that will have the best conversion and then further optimize for that search term.

The “current ranking” for that keywords is especially useful because if you are ranked 11th (or higher) it might be difficult to get in the top 3 search results (depending on the term), but if you are ranked 6th through 9th you can possibly do some optimization to get to 1-3 and get some real traffic.

Go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ to get started.  Also, be sure to submit a sitemap through the sitemap submission tool

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