If you have a website, there are a number of free webmaster tools available through Google that are absolutely indispensable in helping you increase your website’s visibility and traffic. The Google search engine is one of the most popular search tools on the Internet. You can find these tools by going to Google.com and then clicking on the business. Ranking high in the results for keyword phrases that relate to your products or services will increase your traffic and sales. Google provides a number of free tools that help you see exactly how well your website is doing, showing you what needs improvement, which pages aren’t ranking, and what works for you.

Although Google offers a number of different tools for a small fee, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on Google Webmaster Tools. This free service allows you to learn a number of valuable pieces of information about your website. First, you need to verify that you own the site by adding a specific meta tag to your home page header or by uploading an HTML file. Once you do this, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your site.

Google Webmaster Tools: Diagnostics

Googlebot is the web crawler that searches the Internet to find relevant pages that match the search terms that people enter into the Google search engine. The diagnostics section focuses on what Googlebot comes up with when it crawls your site, as well as the mechanics of your site.

web crawl-This shows you if there are any errors or problems that Googlebot finds when it crawls your site.

content analysis-Problems with your site’s meta tags, meta titles, and descriptive information will appear here.

mobile tracking-Problems and errors on pages designed for mobile phone viewing are found here.

Google Webmaster Tools: Statistics

This set of tools focuses on the traffic that comes to your site and how it gets there.

Top search queries – Find out what keyword terms people generating your site are using in the results list, the click-through rate you got when pages from your site were shown, and what number in the list of pages your site appears in the search engine Google search.

Crawl Statistics-this shows you a bar chart of how your pages are doing in PageRank based on the rating when Googlebot crawled them. They are displayed with a rating of high, medium, low, or not yet assigned.

subscriber statistics-If you have subscriber feeds like RSS or Atom available on your site, this will show you how many subscribers you have for those feeds.

What does Googlebot see?-This shows you what phrases and content are used in external links to your site. It helps if these phrases are related to the content, products, and services on your site to help drive the right traffic.

Statistics Index-This tool allows you to see which pages link to your site and how Google indexes your pages.

Google Webmaster Tools: Links

Pages with external links-Here you will see which pages of your website have incoming links from other websites.

Pages with internal links-here you can find out which of your pages have links pointing to them from other pages on your site.

site links-This shows you which of your links can appear directly in Google search results.

Google Webmaster Tools: Tools

There are also a number of other tools that you can use for free. For example, you can submit a sitemap with all the pages of your site to speed up the process of getting all the pages of your site listed in the Google search engine. You also can:

Analyze robots.txt

Generate robots.txt

Set of geographic targets

Improved Image Search

Manage site verification

Set crawl rate

set preferred domain

remove url

Before you invest in any expensive ranking tools or analytics software, see what Google has to offer for free!