Google Search Console – SEO Tool & How to use it
In my previous blog i.e. 5 On-site SEO Tips For Beginners, I talked about the basic content and link optimization techniques to make your website easily readable by Google and other search engines. In this blog, I will talk about a tool that is pretty famous with SEO Experts but it more often does not get the credit it deserves. To be honest, if you can master Google Search Console previously known as Google webmaster, you will surely need no other tool to optimize your website for google search engine.
To start, go to the Google Search Console Domain and log in with your Gmail ID. You will end up on the following screen once logged in. Here you need to add your website as a property.
A dialogue box will open with website input option. Type in your website in the field shown below.
As soon as you add your website, it will show the ‘Not Verified’ message. In order to verify that you really own the website, you will need to follow one of the following methods shown in the video. Verification is necessary in order to ensure that someone else does not use your website’s data without your permission. Start watching the video from 3:48.
I personally recommend the Google Analytics or HTML file verification as they are the easiest. If you are unaware of how to implement these methods, just the HTML file to your website developer and they will take care of it. Once they give you go ahead, click the verify button.
After verification, you will see your website with the manage property button on the right side as shown below.
From here you can add or remove different users to manage your property in the search console or remove the property as well.
Now click the property thumbnail. A dashboard with all the information about your website will open. It will be empty at first. But visit it after 2 or 3 days and it will show you all the relevant information of the following options.
Now it is up to you to explore all these options one by one on your own. Things I will personally recommend you to do are Data Highlighter under search appearance which makes sense of your data to Google and how its structured on your website. Once you have highlighted your data, go into Google Index option and run a Fetch as Google query and your data will be submitted to Google Search Engine almost immediately. Sometimes the crawler might take time like an hour or more but in my case, I have seen instant crawl bots on my website.
In the Search Traffic option, you will be able to see all sorts of inbound (Backlinks) and outbound links of your website.
You can find various tutorials on Youtube with in-depth information about all the options and their execution shown in the above screenshot.
Hope you liked this article and will share it with friends and colleagues in need of this knowledge.