A question came in from my good friend Fletch about a post I wrote a long time ago about Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins for Martial Arts school Owners.

Fletch asked:

… Also, you say we, your loyal readers, should register a Google, Yahoo, and MSN webmaster account, but you don’t tell us what we should do with those accounts. I looked on Google’s FAQ about that, and it was a bit confusing. It seemed like a good idea but didn’t apply to me. Maybe you could do another post explaining what we need to do with those webmaster accounts. I don’t mind figuring out how to do things, I just would like to be pointed in the right direction for what would be a good use of my effort. Thanks for the advice!

This was in regards to the following recommendation in that post:

Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin
Another great SEO friendly plugin. In order to maximize this plugin, you should also register a Webmaster Tools account with Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

By creating webmaster tools account with Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly MSN), you can tell the individual search engines where your XML sitemaps are located and what pages on your website you want them to spider. I highly recommend you do this with all three, not just Google; even if the majority of traffic comes to your website from Google.

Further, these accounts also give you additional tools to help diagnose any problems on your site that might be interfering with the spidering of your site like broken files, missing files, bad links, etc. If you have a lot of errors, it can impact how your site is spidered and may make it difficult for them to rank your site.

By updating any errors that present themselves, it demonstrates you are trying to run a “clean” website; which the Google Gods smile upon because it makes their job easier to crawl your site. I bet you’ll find errors you never even know you had.

What kinds of things are in Google’s webmaster tools account?

1. Sitemaps – Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. You will have to verify the site is yours before being able to hav ethem spider your sitemap. This is pretty simple and they give you two options to verify.
2. Crawler access – Lists pages blocked and the reason(s) why they were blocked.
3. Sitelinks – Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. Not all sites have sitelinks. Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don’t want.
4. Search quires – A list of all top search queries that are used to find your site in Google.
5. Links to your site – A list of pages that have links from outside websites. Also shows you what URL’s (domain names) those links are coming from.
6. Keywords – The most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. These should reflect the subject matter of your site.
7. Internal links – A list of pages linked to by other pages on your site.
8. Crawl errors – Issues Google encountered when crawling your site.
9. Crawl stats – Googlebot (Google’s spider) activity in the last 90 days.
10. HTML suggestions - Google detects any potential issues with content on your pages, including duplicate, missing, or problematic title tags or meta descriptions.
11. Site Performance – This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users.
12. And more!

Each search engine has their own tools, but that at least gives you an idea of what Google offers.

You can sign up for a webmaster tools account at all three major search engines here:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster Center

If you don’t have a WordPress site, you should still do an XML sitemap. You can either learn how to do it by hand or you can use an autogenerator to do it for you. Once complete, you would still create a webmaster tools account and tell them where to find your XML sitemap.

Hope that helps, Fletch (and everyone else who had the same question)!

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