1. Site Configuration

 Of most interest under the Site Configuration are the Sitemaps, Change of Address and Settings.

Sitemap

Nothing much has changed with regards to the Sitemap, the functionality is basically the same. Submit your sitemap to Google to get your site indexed fast!

You can either generate a sitemap through built-in functionality provided by your CMS tool of choice or generate a sitemap with a tool that you have downloaded and installed on your PC.

If you are using Wordpress or Joomla, you can install a Sitemap plugin that will automatically generate the Sitemap to start off with, and then keep on adding your new pages to the sitemap as you add to your site, as well as notify Google, Yahoo and MSN that you have added new pages.

The Sitemap tool that I prefer using if you have to manually generate a sitemap is Gsitecrawler.The tool is free to download and use.

Change of Address

This is an interesting one! If you have ever tried to change your domain name you might have found out what a major impact this may have on your website's ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). I changed the domain name of my web hosting site from http://www.internet-web-hosting.co.za to http://www.tm4yhosting.co.za over a year ago and the new site still does not have close the level of rankings or visitors that it used to have. 

Think very carefully before you change your domain name!

In this section of the webmaster tools, Google offers advice and utilities on how to make the transition. Please note that I did everything that they recommended to do (including having a 301 redirect from each individual page of the old site to each individual page of the new site, verifying the site and submitting a sitemap) and it still did not help. The only thing I did not do was to notify Google of the move through this utility that they now have available since at that point it was not available under Webmaster tools yet. Hopefully this might ease the pain of the transition but I am not prepared to take that risk again!

Settings

Settings is also a great new addition to the Webmaster toolset. It is well known that if you have a .com domain, hosted 'offshore' (in other words, not in your local country), that your local Google (for example Google.co.za) will not pick up on the fact that your website is targeted at a South African audience and your website will lag behind in the search results for your country (or not show up at all). With this setting your can inform Google that your .com or .org domain is targeted towards South Africa. What you cannot do though is to target your .co.za domain to another country!

In this section you can also update your canonical settings for your domain. Remember that Google sees http://tm4yhosting.co.za and http://www.tm4yhosting.co.za as two different domains. You can specify here which one of the two you prefer Google to use as the main url of your site.