Using Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

If you're like a lot of other website owners, you have yet to fully value what Google Webmaster Tools can do to help you with your site's SEO. That's something you're going to want to fix right away!

I mean what better place than to go to the horse's mouth for tips on how to better optimize your pages to rank well in Google than, well, Google!

Rather than overwhelm you with the entire suite of tools, here are 4 of the most useful ones to get you going!

4 Of our favorite reports that will help your SEO

HTML improvements – The report shows you how well your site does behind the scenes. Details like if you have missing, improper or duplicate title tags, descriptions as well as content are definitely items you'll want a heads-up on. HTML Improvements will help you do exactly that, make improvements!

Search Queries – This report is probably the most useful of all. You can divine several great metrics, including impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate, keyword terms searched, image and video SEO and much more. While the keyword data is limited, and only extends back thirty days, it is still useful.

Crawl errors – This report will tell you which pages are returning a 404 error code, that is, not found. These you'll want to address as soon as possible, as you are losing traffic, and your search engine results could very well be skewed as well.

Links to your site – Knowing which sites are linking to your pages, as well as your most popular pages is very good site intel to have. It's not uncommon to be surprised by what shows up here, as pages you had no idea were doing this well often present themselves.

Google Webmaster tools are a very useful tool for telling you what you need to be concerned with and fixing within your SEO. It ought to be your first stop, even if you do eventually use a more sophisticated paid tool to dive deeper.