Using Google Webmaster Tools for your website can give you a wealth of info about your site. It’s especially great for SEO.

Here are 3 reasons to get verified and use Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Target a specific country

If you have a ‘neutral’ top-level domain like.com or .org, you can tell Google which country you want to target.

This is especially useful if you want to target separate countries – just set up subdirectories for each country you want to target, and then treat each subdirectory as a separate site by setting up Webmaster Tools access for each folder.

Of course, there are other things you will need to take care of if you want good rankings across more than one international version of Google.

2. Find out if Google can crawl your pages efficiently

If a page has too much code in its source, the Googlebot won’t be able to index the whole page effectively. This means Google might not index some essential content on the page. So you’ll lose out on rankings even if your page has great relevant content.

However, Webmaster Tools has recently added a ‘fetch as Googlebot’ feature in the ‘labs’ menu. Simply enter the URL of the page you want to check and it will tell you what the Googlebot sees.

If Googlebot can’t read all of your page before it gives up you need to cut down on the code.

3. Spot duplicate titles and meta-descriptions

If you have a massive site, it’s not always easy to spot duplicate and missing titles and meta-descriptions. And these can be an issue for your users as well as your rankings.

But Google Webmaster Tools will flag up these issues in its ‘HTML’ suggestions feature – leaving you the (usually simple) job of going in and making the changes.