Google Webmaster Introduction

You may already know Google Webmaster very well. But I have to start with this. If you miss it, you miss the greatest channel to communicate with Google.
Google is doing a great job with this tool, much better than Yahoo! and MSN. Whenever you start a new site, there are several tasks on your must-to-do list:

1. Verify your site on Webmaster;
2. Create and submit a sitemap to Webmaster;
3. Generate a robot.txt file to let Google know which pages to crawl and which not to;
4. Check your sitemap status one day later and fix any problems reported by Webmaster.

I strongly recommend you check Google Webmaster once a week. Things you should pay attention to include but are not limited to:

- URLs Errors;
- Duplicate meta tags;
- Crawl stats;
- What Googlebot sees;
- Top search queries;
- Pages with external/internal links.

With webmaster, you can easily figure out what's wrong with your site and how to improve your site. For example, if you see low Googlebot activities on your site, you may have to update content harder. If Google sees a lot of irrelevant keywords and phrases to your site, you should find more relevant inbound links.

Anyway, read its online help section and get its forum feed. A SEO master must be a Google Webmaster Ninja.