One of the most informative newsletters I have subscribed to is ClickZ Experts Search Engine Marketing.

I found one article by Erik Dafforn particularly helpful in which he discusses the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT).

It was published by ClickZ Experts Search Engine Marketing and titled Demystify Google webmaster Tools Reports. 

Erick starts out by posing the question Is there too much information?

He states “... Google Webmaster Tools contains a trove of analytical and diagnostic data for your sites. But is there too much information there? For many marketers, there's so much data that it's often hard to know which reports and features are "need to have" and which are "nice to have."

Erick goes on to describe the three Google Webmaster Tools categories of Site configuration," "Your site on the web," "Diagnostics and numerous sub categories.

He discusses Sitemaps, Crawler access to your site (for page indexing,) Sitelinks, Change of Address and Settings all sub categories of GWT.

In his second report also published in ClickZ he talks about “Your Site on the Web” section, a section that discusses the measurements Google uses to rate your site.

This is a must read as Erick explains the respective roles Impressions, Clickthrough, and Links.

This is the data that allows you to see who is linking to your site and the page they are linking to. If your goal is to track links to a specific URL by viewing the before and after results this information also allows you to gauge the effectiveness of a particular campaign. A very valuable tool indeed. However, Dafforn also provides some useful reasons to view the data with a critical eye.


"But pay close attention to the list, because not all links are created equally." Following are a few reasons to treat the link data with a critical eye. Its more than just a numbers game. It’s the quality of the links that is important.

Keywords

This report collects data from your keywords and the body text and numbers the key words and phrases. This information allows you to check to see if you text matches the goals you have for the site.
Internal Links. This report also supplies the information necessary for you to test your site to ensure that Google is finding all of the pages on your site.


Subscriber Stats.

If you have an EML feed on your site this report will give you the total number of subscribers. This figure doesn’t include subscribers from non Google properties such as Yahoo.

In Erick’s next column he is going to look at the Diagnostics section. I will place a summary here when he does but I do recommend that you subscribe to ClickZ newsletters.