9 Step SEO Checkup Using Google Webmaster Tools

If you’re an SEO beginner, Google Webmaster Tools (also known as GWT, if my fingers get lazy) is a great place to start a site tuneup. If you’re buried in SEO minutiae and need to pull together some intelligent, actionable to-do items for your site, you could do a lot worse than signing in at Google.com/webmasters/tools. Here’s my quick guide to an SEO checkup, GWT-style:

1. Go Looking For Trouble

First, fix what’s broke. Use the Crawl Errors report as a great way to get a head start.

2. Find Duplicates Duplicates

Haha. Get it? Duplicates twice… it’s funny… sniff. I crack myself up.
Duplicate content is a long-standing SEO bugaboo. Use the HTML Suggestions report to help diagnose duplication problems.

3. Find Crawl Depth Problems

In a perfect world, you want Google to crawl 100% of your site’s visible pages. Use the crawl stats report to see how close you’re getting to this ideal.

4. Check Your Relevance

Now for some really neat-o stuff. Click Your site on the web::Keywords and you can see what Google thinks are the most common keywords on your site.

5. Look At Rankings

Knowing what people type, and which searches get you clicks, is invaluable search intelligence. Use the Search queries report to gain great insight. Click Your site on the web::Search queries

6. Gain Insight Into Link Strategy

Find out what links Google thinks are important: Click Your site on the web::Links to your site. Then:

• Look at ‘How your data is linked’ to review anchor text and see if you need to diversify;
• Look at ‘Who links the most’ to see inlinking domains; and
• Check ‘Your most linked content’ to find the ‘stickiest’ cotent on your site.

7. Check Your Site’s Structure

Take a look at Your site on the web::Internal links. Review which pages are getting the most links from within your site.
Remember: Links are votes. Make sure the most important pages on your site are getting the most votes. If the ‘Terms of use’ page is the most popular, something’s probably wrong.

8. Check Messages

Make sure you click Messages and see if Google’s alerted you to any big changes. Examples include a sudden increase in the number of URLs found by Googlebot or possible site outages. Google doesn’t go out of its way to tell you if there’s a problem. So, if you see a message from them, you need to pay attention.

9. Check ‘Fetch As Googlebot’

Got a page that’s stubbornly refusing to show up in the Google index? Click Labs::Fetch as Googlebot. Type in the URL of the pesky page and run the tool.

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