webmaster tools - would love an overview

[nijinsky50]

hey Guys
Great forum, i've been reading the threads for the last few days and am posting
my first thread. I have recently been adding my fairly new sites to webmaster tools
to check out how this could help me in weighing up keywords to target. As with most
things Google however i find their explanations very vague and i was wondering if anybody
had a good overview to give on how webmaster can work for you.
Particularly i am confused by the Search queries page which refers to impressions and clicks
to do with a list of phrases. Firstly i'd love to know where they get these phrases from( is it
simply the phrases that the site has a top 1000 ranking for?) and
what their significance is because it seems to me it isn't a list of the busiest terms that
are associated with the keywords of my sites, as i would have expected it to be.
eg website about fruit, targetting apples,pears,oranges,plums etc i would have
expected long tail keywords to appear listing the amount of traffic each gets and
the amount of hits my site is getting eg red apple trees 46 clicks 800 impressions.
It also refers to displaying..... underneath the clicks total, any idea what that is about?

I read that the main reason for the difference between analytics and webmaster in the figures
is webmaster strips out duplicates and bots but there is such a large difference in my
figures that i am skeptical. Any views on webmaster would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
david

[Tim Buchalka]

Hi David,

As far as I am aware these phrases are what Google deems is most significant for you site.

See this post

Google Webmaster Tools Keyword Significance - Internet Marketing Blog by SMT

But the last time I looked I would agree there is often a huge different between the two.

Regards


Tim

[ngovgroup]

Importance of GWT is that keywords list can indicate whether your site is heading towards right direction. And it is an excellent tool for gathering necessary statistics and very important that you don’t have to pay a penny for such a valuable information.

[nijinsky50]

Thanks guys.
NGO do you think that GWT does indicate that you are following the correct path.
My main gripes about it are it is always out of date, it's rankings don't match what i see
from Market samuari rank tracker or from live searches, the "most relevant" phrases
aspect seems very spurious, and most of all the statistics seem nonsense. I googled this
very subject and found SEOmoz and their partners Distilled had investigated GWT over
a range of clients and came to completely opposite findings so that didn't move me
on much further other than considering GWT is a waste of time.

To elaborate on my comment about the stats, the Impressions and the clicks are so
different to GA and AW stats that it looks like they are talking about different sites,
i am running 30 sites through GWT so i have a good base for comparison. Looks like
a classic smoke and mirrors issue, Google offering to give you great analytics info
to back up their online marketing game that they control but the info is unuseable.
IMHO Host server unique visitor and average pages per visit are far better indications
of progress.

[ngovgroup]

As we all know Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for any site owner. It gives detailed information on broken links and popular keywords. It’s designed to inform webmasters about how Google bot is interacting with their website.

[davidd]

Just use it with a pinch of salt. Compare it to your server stats as you say. That is the best youll get. Im glad we got it.