LET me start here with the important fact that the primary goal of every website should always be to deliver to its visitors the best information or products in the best possible way, and ideally Google should be one of these visitors. The takeaway here is the visitor comes first.

One of the first things I ask my potential clients is — do you have Google Analytics connected to your site? Analytics has proven to be a great tool to analyse traffic coming to a site, particularly the volume and demographics, and in days past, we would be able to see details on the keywords bringing traffic to your site.

This is juicy information that tells you exactly what people are typing in to bring up your website in the search results. Another less used tool that has proven to be a must-have for webmasters is Google Webmaster tools.

On May 20th 2015, Google announced that “Webmaster Tools” didn’t accurately depict the user base of their tool anymore and they renamed the tool “Google Search Console”.

Back in 2011 when Google introduced SSL pages for the safety of purchasing online, webmasters and savvy website owners discovered a disturbing phrase in Google Analytics at the top of the list of keywords that bring traffic to their sites. The phrase “keyword not provided” wreaked havoc in the online marketing space as no longer was this vital information being served.

However, fortunately Google created an alternative option in Webmaster Tools. It delivered a cumulative list for the top 1000 search terms (queries) that covered a 30- day period. This has now been improved to cover a 90- day span and I have seen cases where just under 10,000 terms have been listed in Webmaster Tools.

In Webmaster Tools, there is also a “With Change” button that shows how traffic has changed over time and how clicks from Google have changed, a very important nugget. One can even test meta descriptions and titles with this tool! In Google Webmaster Tools you can also filter the results by image search, video search and most importantly, mobile search.

This way you can keep track of what pages are being browsed by mobile users and ensure that the pages are delivering a clean mobile experience. Another interesting segment of information is the tab “Top Pages”. This will show the list of the URLs of your most visited pages.

If these are pages you want to rank for, great! If not, you may want to revisit the structure of your site and improve the rankings of other pages that may be more relevant to what you have on offer. Webmaster Tools also delivers information on the links to your site.

Under three separate headings you can see at a glance which websites are linking to your site, what content is linked to the most and which anchor texts are used most frequently.

The Internal Links section gives you informaton on the links within your site, and can also reveal if you have any old pages still up from a previous version of your site so that you can make changes to fix this, as it will be producing 404 errors to your visitors. Google Webmaster tools should be checked regularly by you or your webmaster to stay on top of any potential issues and to see what is working and what is not.

The Manual Actions section shows what manual action, ie penalties, Google has served your site. You want to see “No manual webspam actions found” in this section.

Remember, the visitor comes first, so Google wants to deliver quality sites to its users. Here are a number of things that Google is looking for and that will cause a penalty.

These are all signs of unnatural optimisation or a low quality site: Unnatural links — stay away from link networks! Hidden redirects — ie affiliate links that are masked Thin content — avoid duplicate content or pages with little or no text Hidden text — white text on white background, an old trick to write for Google’s bots.

Write for your readers, Google is on to this Hacked — If your site has been hacked and not cleaned, Google may lower your search rankings Plain spam – Scraped or spun automatically generated content Spammy freehosts — Even if your site sits on a host with spammy sites this will affect you.

Choose hosting wisely Spammy structured mark-up — Avoid using rich snippets on too many irrelevant elements on your pages The Mobile Usability section — this is ultra important and Webmaster Tools will give you information on what is wrong and on how many pages the errors occur.

A web developer with basic knowledge of CSS can fix these issues and deliver a more pleasant experience in mobile which we now know is a key factor in how your website will appear in the search engines.

Mobile is everything! You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools by going to google.com/webmasters/tools, or if you prefer you can have a professional handle it for you.

Melanie Phillibert is a web developer and Internet marketing consultant. A multiple-award-winning online marketer, she has studied Internet marketing and web design/development, SEO, PPC, Spoa, media management and e-comerce development for the last 10 years. She can be contacted via e-mail at melanie@internetmarketingsynergies. com.