Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for you. Your website’s visibility can be improved in Google’s search results with its help. It informs webmasters about how Google is interacting with their website. It’s free to use, just like Google Analytics.

The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. If you use other Google services, you can use the same login. If not, you can sign up for a free.

Once you add your sites (yepp, sites – you can add as many as you want) to the Dashboard, each site have to be verified. If you can’t verify your site, Google won’t be able to get an insight.

You can check how Google crawls and indexes your website, when your site was last crawled and which pages are already indexed by it.

The Overview page shows you how many errors Google noticed. You can check restricted and unreachable URLs and you can see the broken links which lead to 404 error pages. You also can find the referrer sites where these links are. I hope you feel how powerful it is – you can fix any problems that prevent Google from indexing your pages.

If you have broken links that are coming from inbound links, a 301 redirect can be setup on your site to fix the problem as soon as possible. It’s sometimes easier and quicker than trying to contact the referrer site to update the link.

Google displays restricted URLs as errors. Some pages are restricted by the robots.txt file for a reason (e.g. you don’t want your redirected affiliate link to get indexed or you want to prevent duplicate content) and you don’t need to fix them.

The Statistics page is where Google tells you how it sees your site, which top search queries drive traffic to your site, etc. Top search queries are phrases people looked for and Google displayed your site in the results. This is great information about how people are searching and how they’re finding your site. You can see phrases you never think of 

One of my favourite parts is the What Google sees area where you can understand what Google thinks of your site and how it see your content. This is where you can find the reason your site can’t rank well for certain keywords. You can view comprehensive data about your internal and external links to your site.

You can upload an XML sitemap to help Google crawl all of your pages and to learn which pages are the most important to your site. You can specify your preferred domain name. You can choose how you would like to see your domain name in Google’s search results.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource to see how Google is interacting with your site. You can learn more about the issues, the linking structure, the keywords people use. If you don’t know why your site doesn’t appear on the first page on Google, this tool might help you detect what is the problem.

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? Is it useful for you?

Most of the websites can be accessed by typing the domain name with www (like http://www.fatbanker.com) and without www (like http://fatbanker.com).

Try to avoid using both of them. Choose the one you prefer and stick with it because if you have a preferred domain and you promote this one, Google doesn’t have to give separate PageRank for URLs that point to the same site.

Opinions differ. Someone says use your domain with www because most people type URLs starting with it, others use it without www because it’s something like a subdomain. Choose whichever you think is best for you, just make sure you only use one format from the beginning.

Add a 301 redirect using mod_rewrite

Once you have selected your preferred domain, you can force everyone to use that domain. Simply add a 301 redirect with Apache’s mod_rewrite. It’s necessary to create or edit your existing .htaccess file. You will find it in your sites root folder – usually located in public_html folder.

If there is already an .htaccess file, create a backup.

Prefer your domain with www?

If you prefer to use www before your domain, you can copy and paste the following code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.fatbanker\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fatbanker.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course you will need to replace fatbanker.com with your site URL. Now when your surfers access a URL like http://yourdomain.com they will be redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com. The above code redirects all yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com including directories and files. E.g. yourdomain.com/contact.html will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com/contact.html.

Prefer your domain without www?

If you want everyone visiting your website to do this without www in the URL, simply add the following lines to your .htaccess and upload it to your server:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]


The above code redirects all www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com.

Some hosting provider might not show the .htaccess file or have them in read only mode. In this case you can ask them to set the 301 redirect. They will help you.

If you mess up your current .htaccess settings, you may get a 500 server error code when you try to access your site. In this case just upload the previously backed up file.

Let Google know about your decision

It’s time to tell Google which domain format you want to see in the search results.

Login to your existing Google Webmaster Tools account (or register for free) and set your preferred (canonical) domain. Some days later you will see that all of your pages are displayed in the format you wanted to see in the search results.

It’s great, everyone uses your preferred format and you ensure linking consistence. Having 50 incoming links to the preferred domain will receive more weight than having 20 inbound links pointing to your site with www and 30 links without www in URL. In the second case you present Google with two pages.

Are you using your domain with or without www?

Last time when I was on my trip in Italy without an Internet connection I couldn’t publish posts on my blog. According to Google Analytics the number of my visitors dropped during these days.

A lot of blogs seem like every author sit behind the screen all day long to publish (4-5 posts) daily. They can post every day whenever they are. These bloggers never go away for vacation or if they do, are posting from the beach, from the shops or from the museums.

Or… Can they write posts and schedule them for later? Googling my question I found a post on JohnChow.com about WordPress’ timestamp feature.

WordPress timestamp is a great built in tool that can save you a lot of time – also can save your blog’s traffic when you are out for weeks. You can write a bunch of posts in advance and schedule them to be published in the future. You can use it to improve your productivity.

There are days when we are feeling inspired, have a lot of great ideas to post, your writing is really flowing – and there are days when you can come up with nothing. If you are starting your brainstorming session, write your posts and use the timestamp to post them later. You don’t need to worry about periods you have nothing to write about.

How it works?

• Write your post as normally
• Look for the “Publish” section on the right side and click on the “Edit” where it says “Publish immediately”
• Select the date and time you want your post to be published – you can use a date in the past too
• Click on the “OK” button
• If the date is in the future your “Publish” button will become to “Schedule”
• Hit the “Schedule” button – your post will be automatically published at the chosen time

Remember to publish the post. If you’re just saving it, WordPress will leave it as a draft. Once you press the publish button, your post will queue. When the time comes, your post will be automatically published.

How many times do you use this WordPress feature? How many of your posts have been timestamped?