If you have a website you need visitors and traffic. How do you get more free traffic?

Search engines like Google send a lot of traffic to your sites. The only way to get found your website on search engines is to submit your site. Every search engine provides tools to submit your website to their search database or index.

Google is ruling search engine market share with over 90%. So you should inform Google about your website and pages through Google Webmaster Tools or Search Console.

What is Google Webmaster Tools?

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) or Google Search Console provides a set of tools for your website to enhance search traffic, performance and user experience. It’s mostly used by webmaster’s to optimize their website for search engines.

You can tweak your website design for mobile or desktop based on the reports from Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Search Console allows you to communicate with Google and configure many settings like sitemaps, internal links, external links, indexing and so on.

How do I get started with GWT?

Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console is free for everyone. You can join to Google Search Console https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en from your free Google account.

Once you logged into Google Search Console, you need to add your website to a property.

Click on “Add a Property” and enter your website address.

Then Google asks ownership verification of your website. It’s a good security measure to prevent unauthorized access to your website.

The Google Search Console provides multiple ways to authorize website ownership.

1. Download HTML page with Google code, upload to your root folder and then verify.
2. Add a DNS record to your domain configuration.
3. Add Meta Tag to your home page and then open website.
4. Ownership verification through Google Analytics if you have on your website.

Once your website verified, you can access other tools in Google Search Console.

Major sections in Google Search Console

Whenever you log in to Google Search Console you will be presented with a list of your website properties.

Click on website property and you’ll be redirected to Dashboard on that website.

Here are a few details about each section under Google Search Console

Messages

Here you will see messages sent by Google about your websites like errors, guidelines, and others.

Search Appearance

This section helps you how your website may appear in Google search results. Also learn more about the content structure, HTML elements, Rich Cards, and Snippets. You can make changes to the elements to enhance search results.

Search Traffic

This is a very powerful section where you may track your website visitors, clicks, queries and conversion ratios (CTR) over a period of time.

Search traffic data is very important to grow your website. You can also check internal links and backlinks to your website.

Google Index

Here Google shows how it’s indexing your website. It’ll show index status, URL’s blocked and removed from Google search index.

Crawl Stats

We suggest you check this section before working on in any other section in Google Search Console. Here you’ll submit your website pages through XML sitemaps and robots.txt files.

XML sitemaps help you to tell Google what pages it should include in search results and how frequently it should scan and index your site.

Security Issues

If your website is having pages related to malware, phishing, and hacked content, it will report here to take an action.

Website security is very important and you should not ignore this section whenever you check Google Search Console.

Web Tools

Google provides a lot of other tools to modify your website. You can find one very interesting tool under “Other resources” called PageSpeed Insights.

Use PageSpeed Insights to find out web page speeds on desktop or mobile or any devices.

You can use PageSpeed Insights recommendations to improve your website.

Conclusion

Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console is an indispensable tool for webmaster’s to increase their website traffic through Google search engine.

If you don’t use it already for your website, then get familiar with it and start using it.

FastWebHost can help you in integrating your website with Google Search Console.

Hope this article helps you to start working on Google Search Console.