So the latest twist and/or turn in the rel=author saga has arrived in the form of authorship information integrated into webmaster tools.

According to the official webmaster blog, Google rolled out this new feature in response to requests from online authors. Basically, the tool, which is located in the labs section of webmaster tools, allows webmasters to view basic data about how their authorship linked content is doing in the SERPs. The data that is available is as follows:

1. The URL of the page in question.
2. The impressions that page has had.
3.  The % change in impressions.
4. The clicks received.
5. The % change in clicks.
6. The click through rate as a %.
7. The percentage change of your CTR.
8. The average position of your page.
9. The percentage change of your average position.

While this new element is unlikely to change the face of SEO, there are useful applications for this data. For example, the ability to see the average position of your content could save a lot of time spent checking rankings and calculated averages and percentages, allowing you to more easily monitor your long tail campaign.

The tool will also allow you to monitor the success of your blog and it’s authorship markup over time. In theory, as you build up more respect and authority as an author, your impressions and clicks should grow in number, as should your CTR.

Finally, on the subject of CTR, I can feel an experiment coming on. The inclusion of ‘author stats’ into Webmaster tools now allows you to experiment with different article titles, meta data and author photos in order to attempt to improve CTR.

The resulting info gathered could help you in your wider SEO campaigns, helping you to craft the perfect listing which is more likely to attract clicks and visitors.

Google’s quest for internet supremacy took one seemingly insignificant step forward over the weekend with some tweaks to its Webmaster tools facility.

Widely regarded as the beginners best friend in many circles, Webmaster tools’ main function seems to be to improve the quality of sites on the internet, presumably with the knock on advantage of improving the quality of Google indexed sites too.

In the past, many in the internet industry have witnessed a huge number of updates and changes for Google analytics, but a relatively low level of attention for Webmaster tools. Not so right now it seems.

Google have improved the product by more clearly highlighting which of your sites need the most attention, in terms of three main elements – malware detection, pages removed via the URL removal tool and robots blocked pages.

On the Webmaster tools homepage, your sites will now be ranked top to bottom in terms of severity of problems – so if one of your domains is infected with malware there’ll be no escaping the bad news.

In terms of missing pages, Google have stated that they want to alert Webmasters only when they think they’ve disallowed or removed pages by accident. This is to be achieved by alerting the webmaster if they block a page with pageviews over a certain figure, which Google says means that page is important to the site. Although the specifics of that figure remain uncertain, it’s safe to say it will likely be a predetermined percentage of the site’s views as a whole.

What this doesn’t do is inform webmaster when a page that they think is important goes down in error. A freshly optimised page at the beginning of a campaign for example – it probably doesn’t receive many pageviews but it’s still important to the webmaster/consultant. This demonstrates that, though positive, these changes aren’t to be relied upon instead of a thorough audit of your site from time to time.

For people like me in SEO, these changes do suggest that good things are to come. Perhaps in the future Webmaster tools might become the resource it has the potential to be – namely that those errors keeping you from page one can be identified and eliminated.

Of course, we should all take heed of advice that Google has to give whether it will lead us to page one or not, but still, the ominous side of an expansion of webmaster tools would definitely be that countless sites across the web would be, in effect, controlled by Google – albeit through helpful suggestions and tips.

Earlier this week, Google Webmaster Tools updated on their blog announcing the feature to now connect a Website’s Webmaster Tools Profile directly to a Google Analytics profile.

In this SEO Video Blog, Pete Campbell goes through the process of connecting the two accounts together to help flicking between profiles become that little bit quicker.

Webmaster tools is an essential tool when optimising or administrating a website for a client. The Google tool provides a range of comprehensive information.

Google have introduced new ways of verifying your website in webmaster tools, these include DNS, Meta tags, HTML files and Analytic accounts.

Tutorial

Thanks for watching this weeks SEO video blog, please leave any questions or comments on the supporting blog post.

Improve your SEO with Webmaster Tools.

Like many other free google tools, webmaster tools is an easy to use and effective method you should use to help your SEO. Its will assist you to achieve that page 1 position for your website. Discover how webmaster tools will give you ideas of how you can develop certain areas of your website to improve its performance in the SERPS.

One of the purposes of your internet marketing, is optimizing your site to ensure it gets as many clicks as possible to bring visitors to your site. Learn crucial aspects of webmaster tools and enhance your site to maximise its performance and maximise your conversions.

One of the first things your should do in webmaster tools is submit your XML site map into the sitemaps section under site configuration, as this informs google of all the URLs in your site that need crawling. Once submitted, it will tell you how many of your pages have been submitted, against how many have been indexed and can be found within the search engines. Its an interested aspect of webmaster tools, as it highlights which pages haven’t been indexed so you can take action and look at the architecture of these pages to see if they can be improved to get indexed also, which will improve your SEO.

Check the settings section and ensure that your sites geographic target, matches the country your site is based in. This is particularly helpful when you have a .com or other domain name type which doesn’t indicate the country like .co.uk would. This tells google exactly the location you wish to be primarily associated with and ensures that Google takes your site into consideration for the geographical location that you require when positioning you in the search engines.

See your results in the webmaster tools “your site on the web” section. This is where the best information in terms of value to your SEO keywords is found. Its knowing how to interpret it that is the important part.

The top search queries section is a proven tool for SEO as it shows you all the searches you show up for, in addition to the ones you expect to from your optimisation. It gives you effective insight into how many impressions you site has made under each keyword. There may be some here that you don’t currently optimise for which will give you ideas for new potential keywords. Looking at the average position column you can see if there are any on page 2 that if optimised to get it onto page 1 could bring you more conversions.

These results also show you how many clicks your site has received through each keyword and the click through rates (CTR). CTR’s are the percentages that your site has been clicked on depending on what position it is in the search engines. If you are position 4 and have X amount of impressions for a certain keyword then webmaster tools will tell you what percentage of them impressions resulted in someone actually clicking on your site in the search engines.

This information gets more interesting when you click on the keyword it will show you the difference of what percent your site would get clicked on if it was position 1-3, enabling you to gain insight and take control of what is the minimum position your site needs to be in to reach its maximum potential of visits from the search engine.

You may be at the bottom of page 1 and feel content with that and feel that’s enough for your site to perform but if you then looked at the click through rate for that keyword in webmaster tools, you may see that trends found from google for this keyword is that people predominately only click the top 3 sites then you realise that to receive the rewards deserved, the bottom of page 1 isn’t good enough and that you need to do that extra bit of work on your SEO to help your website reach its potential.

The diagnostics tab within google webmaster tools will enable you to have your site checked for Malware and Crawl Errors. It will show any broken links within your site and any external links that are pointing to a page that doesn’t exist. These errors will effect your SEO and need to be fixed.

In the labs section your can go into site performance to see data on your websites page download speeds. This has become more important and is now being taken into consideration by search engine algorithms . Webmaster tools provides data which enables you to compare the download speeds from month to month of each individual URL within your site. This can help you to understand if changes you have made to content have resulted in slower page download speeds which in turn could effect your page ranking.

The data also informs you of whether your site downloads slower or faster than your main competition which can answer certain SEO queries you may have about your sites performance in the search engines.

The help offered by webmaster tools for your SEO doesn’t end with just telling you if your page loads too slowly, you can click on the individual results where it then offers you information on each URL and how the download time can be made faster to help you compete better with your competitors in the search engines.

There are other aspects to webmaster tools but these are the main ones that will easily guide you into taking control of your website and its potential in the search engines. Take action and try looking at you site with these effective methods and see an improvement in your websites results.