How to use Webmaster Tools – The Complete Guide for Beginners

All major search engines offer webmaster tools to their users. Through webmaster tools you can control and improve the performance of your website on the various search engines.

In this guide, you’ll learn which search engines offer webmaster tools and how you can use them to optimize your website for search.

Click one of the options below to go to the tools of the particular search engine.

What can you do with Webmaster tools?

Before getting into the specifics, let’s see what you can do with webmaster tools.

The features below are common to ALL webmaster tools.

• They are free to use
• You allow you to create an account and verify ownership of your website using different methods.
• They allow you to submit an xml sitemap
• They have reports for analyzing the performance of your website in their search results
• They notify you of problems related to crawling and indexing
• They allow you to manually submit pages to their index (either new or existing pages)
• They have reports for analyzing your link profile

Google Webmaster Tools

Google webmaster tools are by far the most popular tools available, due to the popularity of Google.

Google has recently renamed Google webmaster tools to Google search Console, changed their interface and also added new features and reports.

You can use Google tools to optimize the performance of your website on Google search and get more organic traffic.

You can use the following guides (in the order listed below), to learn how to use Google webmaster tools.

What is Google Search Console? – A beginner’s guide to Google Search Console. It explains step-by-step what is Google search console and what it does. Perfect for those starting out now with webmaster tools.

How to add and verify your website with Google Search Console – Shows you how to create an account and verify your website with Google.

How to generate and optimize your XML Sitemap – Having an optimized XML sitemap is an important part of the process for all search engines. Through a sitemap you can specify which pages you want a search engine to include in their index. In addition, you can use it to give them extra information like when a page was last updated, images included within the page and many more useful info.

How to submit sitemap to Google – Once you generate an XML sitemap, the next step is to submit your sitemap to Google. This guide explains the three available methods.

How to find and fix Crawl errors using Google Search Console – Finding and fixing problems related to crawling and indexing is a very important process for SEO. If a page is not in a search engine’s index, it won’t appear for any searches. This guide will show you step-by-step how to use the Google search console tools and reports to troubleshoot indexing related errors.

How to use Google Webmaster tools to improve your SEO – 10 easy steps to follow on how to use |Google webmaster tools and reports to improve your SEO.

How to force Google to recrawl your website – There are valid cases that it’s better to ask Google to re-index your website rather than wait for the normal indexing process to be executed. This is another useful feature of Google Search Console.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing is not as popular as Google but they do offer webmaster tools to their users. You can use Bing webmaster tools to improve the performance of your website in Bing Search Results.

One of the major differences between Google and Bing is that the later encourages users to manually submit new or updated content to Bing through webmaster tools.

The daily limit for established websites (more than 6 months old) is 10,000 URLs per day while for Google the daily limit is 10 URLs per day.

Another difference is that through Bing Webmaster tools you can associate your website with social media networks. Social media signals have more weight in Bing’s ranking algorithm than Google’s.

You can use the guide below to get started with Bing webmaster tools.

How to use Bing Webmaster tools for Beginners – A step-by-step guide on how to create an account, add your website, submit a sitemap and perform the most commonly used functions in Bing webmaster tools.

Yandex Webmaster Tools

Yandex is the most popular Russian search engine with more than 65% market share in Russia.

Even if you are not targeting the Russian market, it’s worth investing a couple of hours to setup and configure Yandex Webmaster tools.

With the exception of Google Search Console, Yandex tools are the most complete and you can use some of the reports to improve your SEO in general and not just your presence in Yandex.

How to submit and verify your website to Yandex Webmaster Tools – This comprehensive guide will help you get started with Yandex tools. It shows you step-by-step how to create an account, add and verify your website, submit a sitemap, configure geotargeting and other important settings.

Yahoo Webmaster Tools

Yahoo no longer offers dedicated webmaster tools since the Yahoo search results are powered by Bing.

You can use Bing Webmaster tools to manage how your website appears on Yahoo search.

DuckduckGo Webmaster Tools

Duckduckgo is gaining popularity as a search engine the last couple of years but it still has a very low market share, compared to Google and the other search engines.

Duckduckgo does not crawl the whole web as other search engines do, but they get their info from specific sources like Wikipedia, StackOverflow or other specialized search engines like Yelp.

For this reason, they don’t offer any webmaster tools since any changes to the content needs to be done at the original source and duckduckgo will update their index automatically.

Ask.com Webmaster Tools

Ask.com used to be a well-known search engine (formerly Ask Jeeves) but this is no longer the case. Ask gets their content from various partners (like Yelp) and other big website, so they no longer offer webmaster tools to their users.

Baidu Webmaster Tools

Baidu is China’s most popular search engine. They offer a full range of tools to Chinese webmasters.

You can use Baidu webmaster tools to submit new content, check your traffic and keywords, review your link profile and optimize the appearance of your website in Baidu search results.

Baidu does not have an English interface, everything is in Chinese. If you want to target the Chinese market, getting started with Baidu webmaster tools should be your first step.

Key Learnings

One of the ways to optimize your website for the various search engines is to make use of webmaster tools.

The concept behind all tools is the same: you create an account, verify ownership of your website, submit xml sitemap and then use the available tools and reports to analyze your traffic and troubleshoot any errors.

It is normal to spend the majority of your time and effort on Google but do not forget about other search engines. They can generate extra traffic to your website utilizing your existing content.

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