1. Ability to Evaluate External Link Inventory - By going to the "Your site on the Web" section and clicking "Links to your site", you can gather an understanding of who is linking to your site pages and trace back either good or poor quality links to your pages. This helps site owners understand which areas of the site are popular and which areas could use some improvement in terms of link generation. Coupled by the fact that you can break this down by page, this is a very powerful feature of Google Webmaster Tools.
   
   In addition Google has added the ability to gain insight into the anchor text (linking text) of the sites that are linking to your pages. This can help determine the quality of the links that are linking to your site's pages. Very useful information when trying to improve the inbound link quality to your site.
   
   
2. Ability to Set Crawler Access - Accessed via Site Configuration > Crawler Access, Webmasters can create a robots.txt file to specify how search engines should crawl your site's content. Under the "Generate robots.txt" tab, users are four steps away from creating their own robots.txt file to control what content the search engines have access to.
   
   
   
   
3. Ability to Set a Preferred Domain - under Site Configuration > Settings, you can set the preferred domain of your site to be either the www version or the non-www version. Why is this helpful? Well, the preferred domain is the one that you would like used to index your site's pages. If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and Google finds a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com , Google will treat that link as if it was http://www.example.com . In addition, Google takes your preference into account when displaying URLs in their search results. This helps with the whole canonicalization thing.
   
   
4. HTML Suggestions - Contrary to some reports, Google still places a lot of value in title tags and meta descriptions. If they didn't why would it be such a prominent feature in Google Webmaster Tools? This section accessed via Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions provides insight into duplicate title tags or meta descriptions, which are not very helpful to the Search Engines in terms of helping them understand what a given page is about. Remember that meta data is basically "data about data". The engines use this information to determine what a page is in fact about.
   
   In addition, through this feature, Google will let you know if your titles and descriptions are too short, thereby providing limited information to them. If you want to be considered as relevant content for a given topic, you need to inform the engines as to what your page is about. Title tags and meta descriptions can help your cause greatly.
   
   
5. Google Webmaster Tools Help - there is a ton, and I mean a ton of great information in the Google Webmaster help area of GWT. For example, checkout the Webmaster Tools Checklist to help site owners and webmasters set up Google Webmaster Tools properly. I had created my own process for this, but Google has created this handy checklist for you to use.
   
   There are a number of other related resources to access including:

• Video Tutorials
• Google Webmaster Help Forum
• Webmaster Tools on YouTube
• Webmaster Guidelines
• Webmaster Central Blog,
  

Labels: google webmaster tools