Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Authorship, all Google Tools

Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Authorship, all Google Tools

recommend you do too. The three I am specifically referring to are Google

Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google authorship.

Google Webmaster Tools

Why should you use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)?

Here are some good reasons:

• Get notified by Google if there is a problem with your site. Google will send

you messages if, for example, your backlink profile looks spammy, or if your

site is using an old version of WordPress, etc. They will also notify you if they

detect malware on your website.

• Discover any HTML problems with your site. You can then follow the

suggestions that GWT gives you to resolve the issue(s).

• Submit and check your sitemap (which can speed up indexing of your website).

• Select a geographic target audience. For example, if your website targets UK

customers, but your site uses a .com extension, you can use GWT to tell Google

that you want your site to be given more consideration in the UK.

• Check how well your site is being indexed by Google.

• Identify crawl errors. Google will tell you the URLs that it had trouble

crawling, and the page which linked to that URL, thus allowing you to quickly

identify and fix broken links on your site.

• Request Google removes specific URLs from their search results.

• Get a complete list of all links that point to your website (at least the ones that

Google knows about). This can be very useful, especially in identifying links

from spammy sites, which you can then disavow with the Google Disavow tool.

• Identify keywords that people are using to find your site. Google shows you

the number of impressions in the search engines, how many clicks you got, the

click through rate (CTR), and average position in the SERPs (Search Engine

Results Pages). The CTR can be very useful for finding pages that may need

their title/description tweaked so as to try and improve the CTR.

GWT offers a useful set of tools for all webmasters. I highly recommend you

sign up and add your website(s) to your account, so you can track them all.

Sign up here: http://bit.ly/oGe6PP

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free visitor tracking tool, which is far more powerful than

many commercial tools that are available.

Reasons to use Google Analytics (GA) include:

• See details of your visitors, like the search term they used to find your site, how

long they spent on your site, which browser they use, what country they come

from, and so on.

• Get real time statistics, showing how many people are on your site right now,

and which pages they are viewing, etc.

• Connect your Google Analytics account to your GWT account, and Google

AdSense account, for even more tracking features.

• Split-test different versions of, for example, a sales page.

• Set up custom alerts, to notify you about the things that are important to your

business.

• Monitor mobile traffic.

• Lots of other features…

Sign up here: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Once you have signed up for Google Analytics and registered your site with

them, you’ll be given some tracking code to insert into your website. Whichever

theme you use, you should have an easy way to insert your analytics code. Here

is a screenshot for the Genesis theme (Genesis -> Theme Settings menu):

If possible, insert the analytics code into the wp_head() section of your website.

There are some known issues with Google Analytics and the way it reports 'time

on site' and 'bounce rate'. For that reason, I have also inserted another script into

the wp_footer() area of my theme (see screenshot above). You can read more

about these issues, and grab the code yourself here:

http://briancray.com/posts/time-on-site-bounce-rate-get-thereal-numbers-ingoogle-analytics/

Google Authorship

Google authorship is not so much a tool, as something you setup between your

website and your Google plus profile. By linking your website content to your

Google Plus profile, you get these three benefits:

1. Tell Google that you are the author of the content. If someone then

steals your work and reposts it on another site, Google knows that you

were the true, original author.

2. You can have your Gravatar image (globally recognized avatar),

show up next to your content in the search results, which in turn can

add social proof to your listing, and increase click through rates

(CTR).

3. Build Author Rank. This is thought to be an increasingly important

ranking factor. The more Google trust an author, the higher they will

rank that author’s work.

We will revisit Google authorship later in the book, and I’ll show you how to set

it up so that the posts on your site (and on guest blogs), are assigned to you.