Supernova Media Presents:
Webmaster
Tools

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It Starts With Passion
There’s no shortage of creative thinkers out there.
What’s a little harder to find are creative thinkers who
understand business. That’s where Supernova Media
Shines.
We are a full service web company. We provide our
customers with a uniform custom branded web
presence.
At Supernova Media we specialize in the speedy setup
of WordPress websites & blogs. All our websites are
mobile friendly, have onsite search engine optimization
and social media integration.

New Interface
Google Webmaster Tools is a no charge
service offered by Google for webmasters. It
allows you to check indexing status and
provides detailed reports about your pages'
visibility on Google. To get started, simply add
and verify your site and you'll start to see
information right away.

Add to Your Site
If you have a Google Account, you can
sign in to Webmaster Tools straight away.
If not, you can get a free Google Account
now.
Once you have your account, sign in to
Webmaster Tools and click Add a site. It’s
recommended that you add every version
of your site (for example, add both
example.com and www.example.com).

Verify Your Site
Because privacy is important to Google, they need to know you
own a site before they'll show you certain information about it or
enable you to use the tools, so they will ask you to make a
change that only a site owner can do. Here are the options:
• Adding a meta tag to your site’s HTML. This is a good
method if you can edit your home page’s code.
• Uploading a file we specify to the server. Choose this if you
have access to your server.
• Using your Google Analytics tracking code.
• Verifying via your site’s domain registrar.
Once your site has been successfully verified, it may take a few
days for data to appear in Webmaster Tools.

Add Other Users
If multiple people will need access to your site
data, you can easily add and remove users and
specify permissions for each user.
• Owner- Full control over the site.
• Full users- view all data, and take most
actions, such as changing site settings or
demoting sitelinks.
• Restricted- view most data, and can take
some actions (such as using Fetch As
Google and configuring message
forwarding).

Message Center
Google uses the Webmaster Tools Message Center to communicate with verified
site owners. They may periodically send you messages about your site for the
following reasons:
•Critical site health issues—for example, they’ll let you know if your site is down
or inaccessible, or if it’s infected with malware.
•Problems they’re having crawling or indexing pages on your site.
•Information about changes to your Webmaster Tools account.
It’s a good idea to have messages forwarded to your email account. This way,
you won't miss critical notifications if you don't regularly visit Webmaster Tools.
To enable message forwarding, sign in to Webmaster Tools and on the home
page, click Preferences. Then select the email address and language you want.
No email address listed? Make sure you've added one to your Google Account.

Specify a Preferred Domain
Technically, http://supernovamedia.ca and
http://www.supernovamedia.ca are completely different sites and
can display completely different content.
To avoid potential problems and get a better view of your data,
we recommend adding both versions of your site to Webmaster
Tools, and then specifying the version you prefer (Google refers
to this as a "preferred domain").
To specify your preferred domain:
1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

Specify a Geographical Target
If your business is focused on a country specific target audience, you can make the appropriate
setting on the Google Webmaster Tools, so that, you are able to target your country of choice. (For
example, if your site http://halifax.example.com covers restaurants in Halifax, you can target your
site at users in Nova Scotia, rather than Europe.) This will help us in determining the relevancy of
your content to users' searches.
To specify the region:
1. On the Webmaster Tools
Home page, click the site you
want.
2. Under Configuration, click
Settings.
3. In the Geographic target
section, select the option you
want.

The Crawling Process
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated
pages to be added to the Google index.
It’s a network of powerful computers that work together like a gigantic, super-
speedy web browser. It visits web servers, requests thousands of pages at a
time, then downloads those pages and delivers them to the Google indexers.
Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which
sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from
previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by
webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on
each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to
existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Crawl Errors
To determine if Google is having any problem accessing or understanding
your site's content, check the Crawl Errors page in Webmaster Tools. This
page lists problems Google encountered when attempting to crawl your site.
There are two types of errors you may come across:
 Site errors: Problems that prevent Google from accessing your site at all.
These often mean that your site is down, and you should address these
issues as quickly as possible. Often these occur because your server is
down or overloaded, or because your site or web hoster is blocking
Googlebot.
 URL errors: Problems Googlebot encountered when trying to crawl
specific pages. Your site or webhoster may be blocking access to these
pages, or a visitor may have clicked a broken link or a link to a deleted
page.

Crawl Errors
To view Crawl Errors:
1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click
the site you want.
2. Click Health, and then click Crawl Errors.
One of the most common crawling errors are
404 errors, which occur when somebody tries
to access a page that does not exist (usually
because the page has been deleted or the
user clicked on a broken or incorrect link).

404 Errors
To find your 404 urls, simply click the “more” link
in the “Crawl errors” section of your Webmaster
Tools dashboard and go to the “not found” tab.
Now some of the 404s are temporary crawl
errors and don’t represent any inconvenience to
your users or wastage of link juice, but many
404s will be problematic. Click on the URL to
see the sites linking if you suspect the 404 may
be a problem. Resolve problem 404s by either
301 redirecting to the appropriate page or by
changing the destination URL of the inbound link
(when applicable).

Monitor & Manage
Once you've added your site to Webmaster Tools
and verified ownership, you'll be able to access
detailed information about it. With Webmaster
Tools, you can diagnose potential problems that
may impact your site's ranking in search results.
Check your site health for problems such as
malware, crawl errors, or blocked URLs.
Understand your site's traffic. We'll show the
queries returning your site in search results, the
sites that link to you, and internal links on your
own pages.

Monitor & Manage
Get suggestions for improving your
site's HTML.
Create and submit a Sitemap. Sitemaps
are optional, but they are a great way to
make sure that Google knows about
pages on your site we might not
otherwise discover.
Remove a page or site from Google's
search results.

Diagnostics & Malware
Websites are made by humans, so don’t expect them to be perfect. Your code maybe a bit
messed up, and even worse, your website may contain malware.
Through the diagnostics section, you can figure out what’s wrong with your site and how you
can fix it.
If you have malware on your server, you should see a message here. If you don’t, GWT won’t
show you much.
The reason it is important to not have malware on your server is that Google tries not to rank
infected sites high because if someone goes to an infected site, their computer may get
infected. If you do happen to have malware, make sure you clean it up.

HTML Suggestions
When Googlebot crawls your site, it may find some
issues with your content. These issues won’t prevent
your site from appearing in Google search results, but
addressing them may help boost your traffic.
The most common problems with content is related to
title tags and meta descriptions. If every page on your
site has unique and detailed title tags and meta
descriptions, you should be fine. At the same time, you
also have to make sure your title tags aren’t too short or
too long.
And if that isn’t the case, then you can go through the
URLs that GWT tells you they have an issue with, and fix
it.

Site Performance
Your website’s load time is one of the most important things
you should be monitoring. Every month you should be making
sure you improve this number because if your website is too
slow your Google traffic may drop.
Page load time is the total time from the moment the user
clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is
loaded and displayed in a browser.
Numerous website owners have seen a positive increase in
their traffic by improving their website load time.
If you aren’t sure how fast your website should load, don’t
worry. Google will tell you if your website is too slow or quick
enough.

Conclusion
Google Webmaster Tools is a useful
tool that’s free. If you aren’t making
use of it, you should start doing so
now. The reason it’s worth using is
because it will help guide you and tell
you what to do if you want to improve
your Google traffic.

Our Services
Being Passionate comes easy when you
genuinely enjoy what you do. We offer an
array of services at Supernova Media but
here’s what we do best:
• Web Design & Hosting
• Consulting
• Branding
• Virtual Tours
We know that your success is our success.
Contact Us

About Nancy Bain
Nancy is a business owner, educator, and business strategist
with more than 20 years experience. When she is not advising
and teaching people about social media, Nancy spends a lot of
her own time using social media.
Find Nancy online:
Google+ : Nancy Bain Like Supernova Media on
Follow Nancy on Twitter Facebook
Visit her Website Find her on LinkedIn
Follow her Blog And visit her YouTube Channel