Many of the major search engines offer webmaster tools that help site owners monitor the health of their site. They generally have similar features like site map submission tools, indexation charts and functions for identifying and alerting webmasters to crawling issues. But when optimizing for an international audience, there are some added functionalities that will help you do things like set geo targets for your sites, monitor search queries and keep tabson your webpage visibility internationally. Let's take a look at some of the features of Google Webmaster Tools that can help you with your international SEO efforts.
In Google Webmaster Tools, a key international SEO feature is the International Targeting section. We just looked at how you can leverage hreflang tags earlier in this chapter, and if you've implemented them, Google can tell you which ones they've found and report any errors you may have there in the Language tab. But if you don't have those hreflang tags, you can click on the Country tab, and at the very least you can tell Google which country your site is targeting. If you've gone the route of structuring your international pages on country-specific top level domains, subdomains or other structures we talked about earlier, it is possible for you to add each site to Webmaster Tools, and then set the targets from there.
Of course, if you've got multiple language and regional targets, using hreflang tags is probably gonna be the way to go. Or you might yourself using a combination of bothmanaged sites and webmaster tools and the hreflang combinations. Any way you go, this is one of those things that you definitely want to do in Webmaster Tools. Now if you created site maps for your hreflang annotations, here's where you'll let Google know about their existence. You'll wanna go to Crawl, Sitemaps, and click on Add/Test Sitemap, and then type in the address where the xml file lives so that Google can find it.
Google will then let you know if it was successfully submitted, and if it was, you can returnafter a few days to monitor how many pages are indexed or see any errors or warnings and things like that. Next, with all that localized content, you'll wanna make sure that your target audiences are finding your content and what types of search queries you're getting search visibility for. That's where the Search Traffic, Search Queries and Top Pages reports come in.Let's use the filters to take a look at what types of search queries and impressions we're receiving from a specific country.
First let's take a look at what filters we have available to us. On the search side, we can choose between web, mobile, image or video searches. For this one, let's leave it set to all.Next we can pick the country we're interested in. In this example, let's take a look at Australia.Next you can filter out the obscure ones by limiting it to traffic with more than ten impressions, if you like. Here we'll leave them all, and the results will show the keyword queries that are driving the search impressions that you selected in the region that you selected.
You can use this data to continually monitor your regional keyword queries, and to identifyon-page optimization opportunities. If you click on the Top Pages tab, you can get informationon some of the pages that have been seen the most in search results. And the same filters here are available. This information can be highly actionable, depending on your location and content goals. For both multi-lingual and multi-regional sites, these reports can give you an idea of how well you're doing with respect to search visibility against your keyword targets, and which of your regionalized content is being consumed in the different regions you're targeting.
And it's also important to note that in either report you can click on a row to see which pageswere impressed and clicked on from a search query, or in the Top Pages tab, which search queries led to impressions and clicks for a given page. This can be helpful in validating that you've got the right pages being returned for the right queries. Of course, Google Webmaster Tools offers a wide variety of features beyond geo targeting or monitoring queries and content. And you'll wanna explore these features further, or see a more detailed overview in the SEO Fundamentals course.
But hopefully these international aspects of Google's Webmaster Tools can help you as you focus on your languages and regions. And remember, Yandex, Baidu and Bing all have similar tools to take advantage of, depending on where your geographic targets lie.
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét