Last week I did a free SEO website review for many small business website owners. Amazingly, not one of them was using the free Google Webmaster Tools. What is Google Webmaster Tools(GWT)? It is a Free valuable tool that provides you with a detailed report about your website on Google. You can use it for everything from finding errors to improving your website’s visibility.

If you want to get started go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and sign up.

Below are my top 5 reasons why you should be using GWT:

1. Diagnose and Fix errors on your website – Imagine taking your car to a mechanic for a diagnostic checkup. That is exactly how GWT works. The diagnostic checkup will find what is broken on your website and allow you to fix it. Here are some things it may find.

• Malware: Malware is a malicious code designed to disrupt your website. GWT will find it for you. Once it finds it all you have to do is fix the issue.
• Crawl errors: You may not know it but many times your website has crawl errors that can hinder your SEO efforts. GWT will tell you about issues Google encounters when crawling your website. It will show you pages not found, pages that are restricted and errors in your sitemap. It will even show you mobile crawl errors.
• HTML suggestions: Yes GWT will find duplicate content on your website. It will show you exactly what the content is. Once found you can easily correct the problem

2. Links to your site – You can see who links to your website, how your data is linked and your most linked content. Thanks to this feature, I was able to find a website that had duplicated MarkNnet Group. It was like looking at a carbon copy of our website but with a different company name and URL.

3.  Keywords – You can find out what keywords are being used to find your website. Which keywords are the most popular and what pages are using them.

4.  Receive inbox alerts – GWT will alert you if they find any malware or errors on your website. You will receive a detailed description of the error.

5.  +1 Metrics – GWT will tell you how the +1 button affects traffic coming to your website.

• Find out how +1 affects your site’s performance in search engines
• See the total number of times your website and web pages have been +1’d
• Check click through rates with our without the +1 button.

There is so much more I can cover on the reasons you should be using Google Webmaster Tools. I think you get the idea here. If you are looking to get started with webmaster tools and have no idea how to get started or how to use webmaster tools, feel free to contact me at 845-259-9396 or email me directly at amiranda@marknetgroup.com.