Looking back at our blog over the last couple of months there have been a lot of mentions of Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and how it can help you so I thought I would write a summary guide about how to get the most from GWT when you are looking at the SEO of your website. So here are some of the things you can use GWT for:

Letting Google know you have changed your domain name –if merging two brands into one or changing the main URL of your site. Google has a “Change of Address” setting which can help support the 301 redirects you place on the old website.

Spotting Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Descriptions – Google offer an HTML suggestions section in GWT to help you spot these and resolve them.

Identifying Soft 404 pages – which are pages Google perceives as being broken links which are serving a 200 header status. This is a useful way of spotting if you have an error handling page which isn’t working right or one that is only serving on some of your broken links and not all of them.

Checking to ensure that the GoogleBot is reading all of the code on your pages or cutting these pages off due to there being too much code (such as ViewState code ) as the Googlebot appears to have a 100k file size limit.  Making sure Google can read all of your code is one of the keys to ensuring that your website ranks. Try using the “Fetch As GoogleBot” command in GWT to ensure you don’t have an issue with this.

Checking the top search queries for your website  can also be done in GWT and this is an option which is visible from the dashboard when you first view your website in GWT. Goole increased the level of data recorded in this screen in April of this year and now offer more depth when viewing which keyword works best and how many clicks to your site this leads to. This can be useful if performing extra keyword research for your site.

Don’t forget to check the content of your robots.txt file in GWT using the “Test Robots.txt” option. Using this tool can ensure that any new items in your robots.txt file will work before you send them live.

If pages from your site are included in Google’s SERPs which you don’t want to be there you can remove these using GWT as well. The Remove URL function is available to remove results from the SERPs when a page either serves a 404 header status or is blocked in the robots.txt file.

These are just some of the functions we’ve talked about in GWT over the last few months, so make sure you have your websites verified with GWT to ensure you are making the most of these features.