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Google Webmaster Tools are for web professionals to use in improving and measuring SEO. For Search Engine Optimisation.
If you don’t believe that web search is being manipulated, read on. How Boris Johnson made search work for him. Make search work for you.
Yesterday I read with disbelief the remarks that Boris Johnson was making in the press. Why was he telling people that he made buses from cardboard boxes and painted them? Who does this? It seemed like the rantings of a lunatic. I read several articles which kept repeating, bus painting, bus cardboard box, bus from cardboard. Who tells people that they made a bus from cardboard?
Then I asked myself why he did this, then about the meeting Boris Johnson would have had with his spin Doctors beforehand. There was damage repair to do after the fight with Boris Johnson's girlfriend and many people search for Boris Johnson's wife, Boris Johnson's children and Boris Johnson's net worth. Then there is the huge Boris Johnson bus story, this was the most searched term for Boris Johnson until today.
His comments were a master stroke of manipulating search results. They want to remove the references to the £350 Million to the EU bus articles. Before, when you searched Boris Johnson Bus, you got information on the Boris Johnson £350 million bus. Now the results are, ‘I make model buses’, ‘paints model bus’ and ‘I make model buses’.
He may have looked stupid, but clearly seems that's fine in return for removing the bus story, from the top of search results. All the press fell for it. They have all published optimised reports which give new search results about ‘Boris makes buses’ and ‘Boris paints model bus’. Search has gone wrong.
Optimising this post for SEO.
This post is optimised for SEO with the Key Phrase of ‘Google webmaster tools’ as that is what I want to draw people's attention to. It contains the correct keyword density in the headings, subheadings and body. Contains external links and internal links for this Key Phrase.
I have also used all the top-ranking search keywords for ‘Boris Johnson in the post. It contains the high-ranking search terms for Boris Johnson. The meta description for the post is “Google Webmaster tools are the secret to Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Understand how it works and how it worked for the Boris Johnson bus and bus painting”.
This is how you make search work for you. All of this is done with research, good writing and RankMath SEO Plugin. I will see how this works out, by checking the information in Google Webmaster Tools.
Using Google Webmaster Tools.
It is essential to use and understand the information from the various tools available from Google. Search Engine Optimisation is SEO and does what it says. SEO is following the guidelines and applying the guidelines, set out by each search engine.
These guidelines are what they are saying you ‘should’ do, to allow their robots to index your website and gather the most information about it. This tells Google what your website does. If it looks like your website is the most popular, accurate and trusted for a certain product, according to the Algorithm, it will appear high in the search rankings. If it is the best, it will be at the top. The best means that you have followed all the rules. (The other thing you need for SEO is RankMath SEO Plugin. See my post about that here.)
We will start in the world of Webmaster tools, with the king of them all, Google. They have a two-way street of business. Making money from other people making money, by offering advertising in the form of search visibility (yes, and adverts), for a particular product. As well as telling the sellers, how to be at the top of the search, so they sell more. Everything flows and it is a truly genius business model. Due to this, Google has the most comprehensive Analytics tools of all the search engines. (Bare in mind Google is just one of many search engines and they all need to be set up. This is why SEO is a big expense for website owners. It is hugely time-consuming and requires an in-depth knowledge of every search engine.)
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Google Webmaster Tools for Improving Search Ranking
Google are very open about how they rank search results. It is to their advantage. They are much less open about exactly how much they can and do influence search. We know there are websites that are blocked in certain countries as well as some blocked worldwide, so we know they can pretty much do anything. We do not know all the nuances of the Algorithm that they say they use. I would guess that they probably invented the usage of the word. It must be hugely complicated, but also easy to change the results of any given search, by changing or adding to the algorithm. They do however give a broad overview of what affects rankings in a search, which is what we are interested in. So we will ignore this larger picture to concentrate on what Google can do for our business.
Google Analytics
The console is here.
This will become the first page you open in the morning! Better than likes on Facebook are clicks on your website. Google Analytics is where you see them. You see how many visitors, how long they spent on your website, which pages they looked at and which country they come from. All of this information is gold, just need to know how to use it. Google provide videos that cover all this, so I will not go into details here. It all depends on how deeply you want to go into the realm of SEO.
Google Search Console search
The console is here.
This is the second most important Google Webmaster Tool and where you can inspect your website. Here you can see what people searched for to end up on your website. As well as a huge amount of other incredibly useful information. You can use the search console to set up analysis of any page, post, or plugin on your website. There are endless permutations that lead to the insights that we are looking for. These insights are on the behaviour of people searching for things and the search terms they use. We want to aline our website with what people search for when looking for our product, online. We adjust and add to this on an ongoing basis to keep up with the SEO of our website.
Google guidelines for great search results
- Website Speeds for SEO
- Keywords for Websites
- Key Phrases for Websites
Website Speeds for SEO.
The main items that we are concerned with to become Webmasters are Keywords, Keyword density within the text, Key Phrases, Slugs, images, external links, backlinks, internal links, comments, activity and more.
The addition of this information, in the right place, is the key to all this. It is necessary to set up a best practice situation, where we carry out these tasks with every post we make. (See article on posts here). That is why it is important to have an understanding of this if you wish to manage your own website.
Google guidelines for search are freely available, as well as a lot of practical information. The place to start on the Google Webmaster Tools quest is the Google Webmasters Support page. This is the gateway that leads you onto the other sites within sites Google, that cover all the Webmaster Tools.
Page loading times. First Contenful Paint.
Related, but off-topic, (the reason it is off-topic is that it is about page loading times, not search results), is the new mini-site from the Developers section of Google. The, for some reason very appropriately named, Lighthouse Page Speed.
Here you can post your website home URL and receive a score out of one hundred. This is also extremely useful as is about the health and loading speed of your website. It does not give any information related to search results but it will tell you if and why your website is loading slowly. Slow loading is a huge reason for visitors ‘Bouncing’ from your website. This means they went there, but went away before seeing anything (this is the second metric on the Analytics page as it is an important number. You want visitors to stay). So this is another of the tools that need to be leveraged in the ongoing quest for the ultimate Search Engine Optimisation of your website. (See the article here on Website Loading Speeds.)
These exciting Google Webmaster Tools are available once you have verified that you own the website to Google. You then allow them to extract data from your website. In return, they provide information to you. I think of this as a fair trade, considering the value to me of the data they provide. Improving your search engine ranking is based on leveraging the information, from the above tools supplied by Google.
Keywords for Websites.
All you have to do is follow (the many) guidelines that Google give us about Keywords, Keyword density within the text, Key Phrases, Slugs, images, external links, backlinks, internal links, comments, activity and more. Then we are on our way. All of the above state what it is that your website is about. It is the repetition of certain Keywords that lead the search engine to see your website. This is one of the things that Google tells you and in the past, this was a much higher concern than now due to reasons I will come to below. The search is now based on all the aspects of your website, not just keywords, however well chosen keywords are still very important.
By giving the information that keywords are fundamental to their search, people have taken advantage of that. Whenever anyone makes rules, there will be people trying to break or bend rules to their advantage. One case in point, relevant to our wish to be top in search terms for our products, is revenue from Affiliate links. (Please read the article on Affiliates here.) All the major online retailers use Affiliates and make it really easy to embed their products in your website with links that take the visitor to the affiliate's shop. If a purchase is made then the website gets paid a percentage as they know the customer came from the website. (How do they know this? Because of Cookies. See the articles on cookies here.)
Key Phrases for Websites.
All you have to do is follow (the many) guidelines that Google give us about Keywords, Keyword density within the text, Key Phrases, Slugs, images, external links, backlinks, internal links, comments, activity and more. Then we are on our way. All of the above state what it is that your website is about. It is the repetition of certain Keywords that lead the search engine to see your website. This is one of the things that Google tells you and in the past, this was a much higher concern than now due to reasons I will come to below. The search is now based on all the aspects of your website, not just keywords, however well chosen keywords are still very important.
By giving the information that keywords are fundamental to their search, people have taken advantage of that. Whenever anyone makes rules, there will be people trying to break or bend rules to their advantage. One case in point, relevant to our wish to be top in search terms for our products, is revenue from Affiliate links. (Please read the article on Affiliates here.) All the major online retailers use Affiliates and make it really easy to embed their products in your website with links that take the visitor to the affiliate's shop. If a purchase is made then the website gets paid a percentage as they know the customer came from the website. (How do they know this? Because of Cookies. See the articles on cookies here.)
Key Phrases for Websites.
Key Phrases are the search term focus of each individual post. You need to find what people are searching for to find your product or service. Key Phrases are ranked. The top-ranked ones will be very hard to get to the top of the rankings. You need to find suitable Key Phrases for all your post and write your posts around them. The Key Phrase for this post is ‘Google webmaster tools’ and you will see that this phrase appears often in the headings, subheadings and body text.
The Yoast ‘Readability Analysis’ and ‘SEO Analysis’ for this post is 100%. This means that over time it will rise up the search rankings for this search term/Key Phrase. I could also buy the Search Term in Google Adwords. You can see this at the bottom of your posts page when you instal Yoast SEO Plugin. Once you have your Key Phrase and your article you then need to rewrite it according to the guidelines, given to you by RankMath. This is the most basic and effective SEO.
When things go wrong with Google Webmaster Tools.
Let's take iPhone protection products as an example. Screen protectors, cases and everything else are the products and iPhone protection is the umbrella. Build a website with iPhone protection in the URL and write about it, including the two words, iPhone Protection in every article about iPhones. Hundreds of articles about iPhones, with talk about iPhone Protection with a certain per cent keyword density per article. This means that the term iPhone Protection appears a certain number of times in the text. With the same keywords in the tags, on images, and everywhere. This will ensure that visitors would be sent to your website when searching for your products.
Unfortunately, this has been taken advantage of. The iPhone Protection website just has articles copied from elsewhere, with the keywords and key phrases added. There is no new information here, it is just leveraging the keywords and tags to send potential customers to the website to click on the link to the affiliate and then the website gets paid by the affiliate. This meant that you were sent to a less-than-informative website when you wanted to buy something. So Google had to change it. Now it is still all about the keywords, just you cannot use too many. Likewise, keyword density is still a factor, but just repeating the words above a certain level will penalise you.
Quality is the way to go.
The Algorithm is now also looking for the ‘quality’ of the articles, somehow. As well as a host of other things. One other notable one is links from other trusted websites to your post. (See article on linking here.)
Anyway this is a very deep subject and I can go off forever in tangents on tangents and the upshot of it all is, there is no shortcut to ultimate SEO. It is about having quality content, that is published correctly.