Google Search Console – The Basics Explained

Do you really know how strategic the role of Google Search Console is in ensuring webmasters their website is running effectively?

Not only are they free and accessible but they also offer an extensive range of useful insights on health, performance, and visibility of websites. They also behave as a direct mailbox for Google to send webmasters messages regarding their website.

How to Add Your Site To Google Search Console

In order to use this tool, you must be logged into your Google account before visiting Webmaster Tools. From there you’ll need to submit your website’s URL in order to add your site.

Afterward, it’ll ask you to verify that you’re the website owner through certain methods. These methods include uploading an HTML verification file to your website’s root folder, adding an HTML tag on your homepage, using Google Analytics and detailing the domain name provider of your website.

Google Search Dashboard

Every time you log into your account, you’ll be greeted with the Google Search Console Dashboard. This will show an overview of the site’s health, search information and indexing status as well as messages about your site from Google.

Configuration

When configuring your website, you’re able to specify a span of settings like the geographic version of Google’s Search Engine preconceived for your site, your preference for domain version and the users who can access your Dashboard. If you’re considering changing domain names, there’s also a broad range of information and tools as well.

Health

In this section, you can identify errors and solve them from its comprehensive data about Google’s indexing tactics of pages within a specified domain. You’ll also be able to observe how many pages are indexed while defining the URLs you don’t want to share with Google.

Traffic

Traffic section helps identify the keywords and search terms websites not only appear for but are generating from within search engines. To obtain this data, make sure Search Console is linked to your Google Analytics profile. It’s also possible to see other domains who are linking to your website, thus amounting to the backlinks they’ve generated and which pages are linked to the most from your website. Another usage of this section is determining the quality and quantity of your inbound link profile.

Optimization

To help Google identify and index web pages effectively, you should submit a sitemap of your website through the optimization section. It offers data about the search engine optimization standard of the pages on your website by highlighting essential improvements of HTML relating to modifying Page Titles and Meta Descriptions.

Labs

It’s a testing area that allows Google to potentially implement features into the Dashboard on an indefinite basis. An interesting area element that allows you to see how content assigned to your Google Author account is performing on search engines is “Author stats.”

Conclusion

To reiterate, Google Search Console provides wide ranges of vital data on the performance of specific domains. If you haven’t already, add Google Search Console to explore the data available and increase your website’s presence on search engines.