The video below was recently posted on the Google Webmaster Blog.  I will write a summary of the main points in this article. I would recommend watching the video as there are some great tips for using Webmaster tools.

If you a website Webmaster Tools is essential for managing your website and optimizing your site so that you get a good SEO ranking.

1) Forward all messages from Google Webmasters Tools to your e-mail address. This is a great tip as you will receive updates if there are any Malware Errors etc. on your website.

2) Use Search Query to determine the popularity of pages on your website. This is very useful for finding out what pages are successful on your website.

3) Keywords feature in Webmaster Tools. This feature is useful for tracking Keyword popularity.

4) Parameter handling is used for reducing duplicate content. Duplicate content can affect your website’s page rank so must be avoided.

5) Another step in avoiding duplicate content is using HTML suggestions. Here you will be able to find out in your website has any duplicate Page Titles or Meta Descriptions.

6) Crawl errors tells you how Google is crawling your website and if the robots have found any errors.

7) Internal links will track the links from within your website.

8) Fetch as Googlebots is a very handy feature on Webmaster Tools. It checks that re-directs and URLs re-writes work as expected.

9) The site performance feature gives suggestions on how to make your website faster. You can track a webpage’s load speed. There is also an option to download a Install the Page Speed browser add-on