Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one vital factor when doing website marketing. But the SEO field is broad and varied. To aid you in knowing how your campaign is doing, it would be good to have a Google Webmaster Tools account. With Google's style to personalise and localise search results, it has become very vital to determine your "average position" in Google.

The Google Webmaster Tools will let you know the exact keywords that are driving traffic to your website. And the results may sometimes even be unexpected. In fact, it is even possible that a high average position for your selected keyword may not generate as much traffic as a keyword where you have a lower average position! This just means that you are not optimising your site the correct way.

Given these advantages, it is definitely recommended for you to open a webmaster account with Google. But there are actually marketers who choose not to open one because they implement "black hat" techniques for certain site while keeping others legitimate. While this reason is understandable, web masters who utilise this technique will also lose out on free and comprehensive information available from Google.

Signing Up for the Google Webmaster Tools

After you have signed up for the Google Webmaster Tool, simply add and verify the information for the websites you want to tract. You can view the data on those sites after that. The fact that the search engines make an effort to personalise and localise results mean that you will most possibly get higher rankings in your home country than in others.

In addition, sites will rank differently at different time frames. Your site, as it is displayed in the search engine results page (SERP) right now might be different after a few minutes. That's why the average ranking is very meaningful. Some of the data that will be displayed on your dashboard include the following:

* Search Queries - the top queries or search terms used by users to find and access your site (this includes the clicks and page impressions).
* Keywords - the keywords identified when the search engine crawled site pages
* Inbound Links - this is the number of links to your site counted by Google's spiders

But more than getting data, it is crucial to make sense of the available information. When you click on the "+" sign after the keyword phrase, Google will display the number of clicks, impressions, and CTR. Also, it will provide information on the specific pages that received impressions and clicks for your selected keywords.