I focused on a wide variety of strategies to improve my video game fonts website. If you missed that post make sure you read about the steps I’ve taken to build a $100/month mini site here. But one of the items I forgot to discuss was how easy it is to improve your website in the eyes of Google by using Google Webmaster Tools.

Now I know this sounds really simple, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw someone write about Google Webmaster Tools. Most people usually write about what Google Analytics can do for you, but that doesn’t mean you can just turn a cold shoulder to Google Webmaster Tools. There are a lot of key features you can take advantage of to improve your website like:

Submitting a site map

If you’re running Wordpress you can download this simple plugin and it will automatically generate a sitemap for you. Then simply put the link to your sitemap within Google Webmaster Tools. This makes it easier for Google to crawl your content and helps to identify errors with your website that could be affecting your search engine results and linking structure.

Analyzing top search queries

You can search the top search queries in which your site appears (impressions). This helps you to figure out where you are in the SERPs for various search terms. Obviously as you can see from this image these figures are not stellar. But this data is from the previous week, so I expect it to improve after Google crawls my new redesign.

Again, there are a few very powerful tools that you should exploit for all of your websites. The benefits far outweigh the time it takes to set up the sitemap, analyze your site for URL errors, robots.txt errors etc. so I highly recommend you spend some time using the tools if you haven’t already.

In typical Google fashion, Google Webmaster Tools are free to use too.

Do you regularly use these?