If you haven’t already signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, you can do so here.

Finding out where search engines spiders had major crawling problems

An unfriendly URL structure or certain rich media content may be giving the Search Engines spiders a bit of a hard time in indexing your blog. Google explains what they call “unfriendly URL structure”, here.

This can lead to a whole part of your blog not being accessible/indexed by search engines. “Diagnostics>Web Crawl” section can tell you exactly, what’s wrong and where.

Spotting problematic content on the blog

In the “Diagnostic>Content Analysis” section, you can see what exactly I mean by “Problematic Content”. Duplicate meta descriptions, Long meta descriptions, Short meta descriptions, Non-informative title tags and Duplicate title tags are to name a few.

Google Webmaster Tools will tell you exactly where these errors occur, so you can make your blog more search engine friendly.

Thorough analysis of the search queries

Google Analytics (or whatever your stats reporting software might be), can repost you the search queries that bring you the traffic. So can Google Webmaster Tools. And also, it can do something a bit cooler too. It can show you what search queries showed up pages from your blog. With this you can further optimize your pages to get more traffic, since you know that your blog has something that people are searching for.

You can see this in the “Statistics>Top Search Queries” section.

See exactly how Googlebot crawls your blog

Log on to the “Statistics>Crawl Stats” section, you can see how active Googlebot is in your pages. You can see the number of pages crawled per day, number of KBs downloaded and so on. If you’re suspecting that your blog has Search Engine Indexing problems, this section should give you the first clue in starting your troubleshooting.

Check out the link love

If you wanted to know what pages in your blog has the most external links pointing to it, well, “Links>Pages with external links” section can tell you that. This is a great method to analyze and promote your blog’s pillar content, since you have an exact idea of your posts’ external link count as indexed by Google. And what’s cooler? You can check out who’s linking to you too!

Sitemap Status

And finally, it’ll tell you all about your sitemap. If you haven’t already set a sitemap for your blog, read this on specifying sitemaps for your blog. If you’ve, then keep a close eye on Google Webmaster Tools to to check out the status of your sitemap. Having a broken sitemap can really be a negative factor for your Search Engine traffic.

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