MICHAEL: Today's question comes from Tiffany Oberoi in
Mountain View, California.
And Tiffany wants to know, "What that top three to five
things that I should pay attention to in Webmaster
Tools?"
TIFFANY OBEROI: So I asked this question.
Webmaster Tools has a ton of really good information, but
sometimes when I look at it I feel like it's a little bit of
data overload.
I don't know what to focus on.
So I'll tell you my top three things, but I also want to
hear from you guys.
I want to hear what are the best features for you.
So my number one thing is the messages.
So that's where Google is sending you information
specific to you that we think is really important.
So I think you've got to put a high priority on making sure
you get those messages.
On the spam team, we're taking a lot of efforts to give more
messages in your Webmaster Tools Message Center related
to spam violations.
So if we think that your page had been hacked or for
specific violations, we are going to send those messages
to you in your Webmaster Tools.
So one thing that you should definitely do is on your home
dashboard set up the email forwarding so the messages
will go to your email, because you don't want to miss any
important messages.
When your site has been hacked you want to
know as soon as possible.
So that's my number one thing.
Second thing, under site configuration settings,
there's some really good stuff there that you can set up.
It's more of a one-time set it and forget it.
But you can set your preferred domain.
Do you prefer your site to be seen as www
or without the www?
So this is really important because people might be
linking to you in different ways.
And if you haven't decided which is the preferred domain,
you might be splitting your link juice.
So decide which one, set it there in the site
configurations, and we'll transfer all the links,
whichever one to your preferred domain.
And it'll show up that way in our search results.
The geographic targeting is also there.
If you have a top level domain that's like a country code
like .de or .cn, that's really obvious what country that is
targeted for.
But if your domain is a .com or .or, one of those neutral
ones, we need a little more hint sometimes.
So if you can tell us this, even though it's a .com, it's
directed at German users, and say Germany is the geographic
target right there in you Web Master Tools has a really good
hint for us.
And then the parameter handling is
right there as well.
So sometimes if you have dynamic urls you might have a
duplicate content issue because you're getting all
these extra parameters added to your urls, and they look
like different urls to us but the content is
actually the same.
Maybe there's a tracking ID parameter or
a sort order parameter.
It's the same content, though, so you can tell Google in your
Webmaster Tools which parameters to ignore because
they don't change the content.
So that's a really good thing.
And then my third one is under your site on the web under
keywords, I really like this keyword report.
It tells you basically what does Google think
your site is about?
It's t top keywords that appear on your site.
So it's really interesting to compare that list to what you
think your site is about.
And sometimes they don't match up.
So you can from that get feedback about what keywords
you should be putting more often on your page.
You should also monitor that list for dramatic changes.
Sometimes when a site is hacked then those hacked
keywords will start infiltrating your popular
keyword list. So if you start seeing Viagra or Cialis in
your top keywords, that's a big red warning sign that
something's not right in your page, unless that is what your
page is about.
OK.
So those are my top three.
How about you, Michael?
MICHAEL: Yes, so I guess you covered kind of the
essentials.
So I'll just mention two more that maybe you
haven't looked at yet.
The first one is HTML l suggestions, and what that
feature does is it lets you know if we've detected any
possible issues with your meta descriptions
or your title tags.
And those are pretty important because those two things can
directly influence how your search result appears on that
search results page.
The title tag, for example, is often what we'll use to show
the title of your site, and the meta description will
often prefer that, if you've written one yourself, over us
just trying to generate a snippet automatically as the
description of your site.
And the things that we detect are if you have a bunch of
duplicate titles or meta descriptions, or if they're
too long or too short so they're not as useful.
Because if you have unique titles and descriptions for
every page that can really help users differentiate the
different pages on the site when they're going through the
search results.
And so they'll know that's the exact article
that I'm looking for.
And so the description wouldn't just say something
like another great article from example.com.
They could actually see a short synopsis
of what that's about.
And the title tags, you don't want to have just your company
name on every single page or untitled or something not
useful like that.
You'd probably want to have the title of your business and
maybe whether it's a product page, have the specific
product or something like that.
Maybe a couple of keywords to describe what that page is
about, which can open search engines and also bookmarks and
stuff like that.
And the other thing that I would mention is in our labs
section of Webmaster Tools, we have a feature called site
performance, that lets you see how fast your site is relative
to other sites on the Web.
And so since site performance has a lot to do with user
experience, users enjoy browsing faster pages, it's
good to know which end of the spectrum are you on?
Are you one of those pages that people have to wait for
it to load?
Or is your site nice and fast?
If your site's a little on the slower side we have a lot of
documentation about how to make your site faster.
And we link to that from within Webmaster Tools, and
we'll also leave a link below this video to let you know how
you can improve your site's performance.
So those are my top two things that I would mention.
TIFFANY OBEROI: Cool.
So those are our top three to five, but there is a ton of
stuff there.
And like I said, we want to hear from you
what are your favorites?
So let us know in the comments.