If you are a newcomer to Google Webmaster Tools or haven't even given it a test drive yet, you should know that there are a number of very useful tools that will help you with your site's SEO.
What better place to find out what's ailing your site than where it matters most, Google. After all, they are dealing out the search rankings, and it's good to know what they think about your pages.
Google Webmaster Tools is a huge suite of tools. For the time being let's concentrate on 4 areas that will give you a lot of bang for your buck.
4 Great Google Webmaster Tools reports to inform your SEO
HTML improvements - The HTML Improvements report is a very handy tool indeed for SEO. It can show you things you need to be aware of, like how well or even if your Meta data is optimized, title and descriptions deficiencies, as well as duplicate content issues. Well worth a look.
Search Queries - Probably the most useful report, Search Queries returns loads of data including impressions, clicks, click-thru-rate, keyword terms searched, image and video SEO and more. The keyword section only goes back for 30 days, but it does give you some data you can use with other tools.
Crawl errors - The Crawl Errors report will show you which of your pages aren't resolving to their requested URL. This typically shows up in the form of a 404 Page not found error. It's extremely helpful to have this information, as it may be a simple matter of fixing a URL, link or redirecting.
Links to your site - This one returns a list of sites that are linking to your pages, and will show you what pages are drawing the most interest. This can be, and often is, quite surprising, as pages or content you may not have thought was significant may very well be drawing loads of traffic to your site!
Google Webmaster tools are a very useful tool for telling you what you need to be concerned with and fixing within your SEO. It should be your first stop, even if you do eventually use a more sophisticated paid tool to dive deeper.
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