Learning From Google Webmaster Tools Part 1

If you have a blog or website and haven’t used Google Webmaster Tools… you should.

It’s basically a bunch of tools that help you understand how Google is currently viewing your site.

A lot of SEO is working out the right thing to do to increase your rankings, or make Google like you more… well this is Google themselves telling you what they like and don’t like about your site, and providing sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways to make improvements to your site.

I’ve picked up a number of things from using Webmaster tools on my sites that I wanted to share in this 3 part series.

The first thing I picked up is…

An oldie but a goodie – a little boring On Page SEO.

Some of the most ancient SEO advice was to make your meta descriptions the right length – not too short and not too long.

Obviously if the description of a page on your site is too short, user’s can’t get enough information about it when they see it in the search listings so they don’t click on it. If user’s don’t want to click on it, Google doesn’t want it there.

In Webmaster Tools, Google will tell you which of your pages has too long or too short a meta description. See below:

wmt1

Here you see Google telling me that 23 of my pages have Meta Descriptions that are too short.

In other words – make these longer and we will like your site more… helpful information!

For those of us WP bloggers, this means how you use AllInOne SEO – or HeadSpace if you use that.

I often get lazy and just paste the title of my blog post into the meta description (I know, I’m embarassed) and now Google is telling me to smarten my act up.

It will also tell you about any pages that have descriptions that are too long, or non existent if you’ve happened to miss out on any pages.

I haven’t fiddled around with it enough to see just which size they prefer, but I’ve seen figures around 30 words be thrown around.

So take note – to give your blogs the best chance in G – make sure those Descriptions are an accurate and decent sized representation of that page’s content.