One of my favorite posts on linking comes from every SEO’s favorite Googler, Matt Cutts. It tells you how to use Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) to identify 404 pages with incoming links. A link to a page that doesn’t exist is just wasted link juice, and Webmaster Tools is a great way to find broken pages and redirect them to the right page. It’ a great way to do more with what you already have.

Today’s linking tip also comes to us thanks to Google WMT. When you have a page or post on your site which manages to attract some quality links, that’s going to help that page rank well for whatever you’ve written about (and what the folks who have linked to you said). The next step is to revisit whatever you’ve written, take a closer look at what links are on the page and make sure you’re sending link love to the pages where it makes the most sense.

Click on Links and then on Pages With External Links

I find it easiest to download all external links into Excel (or the spreadsheet program of your choice).
 
 
 

Subtotal the links (at each change in page, count) Sort the list by external links in descending order.
 

 

Skip your homepage (that’s another discussion) and work your way down the list and take a closer look at those pages with many incoming links. When there’s a chance to help the user by linking to another relevant page on your site – preferably a high value page that you want to rank well organically – drop in another link.

Doing more with the links you already have is one of the easiest linking strategies you’ll ever find. This is one very handy tactic to help improve the link structure of your website.
 

Google Webmaster Tools has been around for a few years now.   Over the past few years, the Google Webmaster Team has done a remarkable job in updating Google Webmaster Tools and listening to the needs of Webmasters and site owners.  For those of you who do not currently use Webmaster Tools, you should.  Google Webmaster Tools is a very powerful tool that you can use to address any indexing issues that Google may have with your site.  Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool for reporting statistics and diagnostics pertaining to the managment of your site’s pages in Google index.  If you are not indexed, you’re not going to rank… and if you don’t rank, you don’t receive any traffic to your site.  (Of course this is from an organic SEO perspective).  If not have not yet set up Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll want to check it out by going here:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools

We have received a number of quesitons over the last little while as to why one should set up Google Webmaster Tools?  Where’s the value in it?  Well there is a ton of value in using Google Webmaster Tools, and the fact that it is free does not hurt either.  There are a number of great features and benefits to Google Webmaster Tools.  Here is a look at some of the reasons as to why Webmasters and site owners should set up and be using Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis.

15 Reasons Why You Should Use Google Webmaster Tools

1. Google Provides Key Information About the Indexing of Your Site – Once you set up and verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools, you are privy to a ton of great information.  Google lets you know about everythign from the laste time Googlebot successfully accesssed your homepage to Not Found 404 error reports to which of your URLs that you currently strict via the use of your robots.txt file.
    
2. Google Webmaster Tools Allows a method for XML Sitemap Submission - Webmaster Tools allows you to submit an XML sitemap to help Google index your deeper site pages and pages that are hader to find or may not yet be indexed.  Once you have submitted an XML sitemap, you can view the stat;us of it, see when it was last downloaded by Google and see how many URLs you have submitted via your sitemap.  Remember that Google allows your to submit a maximum of 50, 000 URLs per XML sitemap.  If you have errors with your sitemap, you can click on the "details" link and Google will let you know about any errors or warnings that they may have with your sitemap.
    
3. Google Provides Key Diagnostic Data about Your Site - this is one of my favorite features.  Once you are logged into Webmaster Tools, you can click on the "Diagnostics" Link/Tab where you are presented with a quick snapshot of some very helpful information in terms of Web Crawl data, Content Analysis (which lets you know if you have duplicate title or meta descriptions or have pages that are missing titles etc.) and Mobile Crawl Errors (where you can see errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site created specifically for viewing on mobile cell phones.)
    
4. Webmaster Tools Provides Key Statistics About Your Site - Clicking on the "Statistics" Tab in Webmaster Tools allows you access to great information including your top search queries, top clicked search queries and informatin about the Page Rank distribution of your site page.
    
5. Webmaster Tools Provides Insight into the Anchor Text of Links to Your Site – From the "Statistics" tab you can click on "What Googlebot sees".  This is a very useful section for examing the anchor text of what people are using to link to your site pages.  We know that the IBL (Inbound Linking) Quality Score is a key factor used by Google as part of their ranking algorithm.  Having relevant keywords in the anchor text can help improve the IBL score of the page being linked to.  Google provides a list of the words/phrases that appear in the external links to your site’s pages.
    
6. Google Webmaster Tools Provides Great information about Interlinking of your Site’s Pages – Probbaly my favorite section of Google Webmaster Tools is the linking section.  Clicking on the "Pages with internal links" provides great insight into which of your site’s pages need help with "link love" from your other site pages.  Being able to see which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site.
    
7. Google Webmaster Tools Provides a Detailed Look into Your External Link Inventory - Want to check the external link inventory of your site pages?  Google Webmaster Tools provides that too.  Click on the "Pages with external links" section to see which of your site pages you need to improve links to.
    
8. Webmaster Tools Allows You to Generate / Analyze Your Robots.txt – Through Google Webmaster Tools, you can interactively create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don’t want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don’t want crawled.  You can also analyze  your robots.txt to see whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make.
    
9. Google Webmaster Tools You Can Set a  Preferred Domain - Have canonicalization issues with your site?  Through Google Webmsater Tools, you can set a preferred domain that will associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading "www." in Google’s search results.
    
10. Google Webmaster Tool allows You to Set a Gepgraphic Target - Targeting users within a certain geographic area?  Webmaster Tools allows you to associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area.
     
11. Webmaster Tools Provide a Number of Other Tools to Aid in the Indexing of Your Site - Click on the "Tools" tab in Webmaster Tools provides access to 8 additional toos that you can use to help Google index your website.
     
12. Google Webmaster Tools is Free! – the cool thing about Google Webmaster Tools is that anyone and everyone can use it because it’s free!
     
13. Google Webmaster Tools is Easy to Set Up - Setting up Google Webmaster Tools is extremely painless.  The verfication process consists of implementing a meta tag or creating a file for Google to crawl.  You can expected data to be delivered within  hours of properly setting up Google Webmaster Tools.
     
14. Google Webmaster Tools Provide Indexing Tips from Google - Throughout the Google Webmaster Tools interfacxe there are links to Google tips pages such as this one.  A number of the links go to Google’s Webmaster’s Guidelines which provide excellent insight into issues that may be affecting your site’s performance in Google.
     
15. Google Webmaster Tools Continues to Improve - As with most Google product and service offerings, the Google Webmaster Tools team continues to improve this product.  Every few months they continue to add features that help Webmasters and Site Owners imporve their website’s so that Google can better organize the World’s information.

There are many reasons as to why you should be using Google Webmaster Tools.  A more important question to ask yourself may be why are we not using Google Webmaster Tools more often?