2. Your Site on the web

This gives you information about your site that you will not find anywhere else, but beware, Google has recently changed the way that they report on some of this information!

Top Search Queries

This will give you a good indication where your site lies with regards to its position in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). You can choose to see your website's position based on international queries or just for your local country. You might see some surprising results - you might actually perform well for search phrases and keyword terms that you are not really targeting, or that you would not expect your website to show up for! 

Links to your site

If you expected to see the number of links back to your site here, prepare to be disappointed. At one stage Google did show all the links back to your site, what they are, as well as to which pages they point. It was great information! Remember that the link:www.yoursitename.com command in Google will show only a very small fraction of the links that they internally have on record for your site. This section of the webmaster tools used to show you everything and you could then get a very good idea of how your link building strategies are progressing. 

At some point though, Google started to under-report on this number as well. It looks as if on average, it only reports on about 50% of the links, for example:

For all practical purposes therefore, this reporting inside your Webmaster area is all but useless since you actually have no idea whether the number reported on is accurate or not (or at least, you can know for certain that the number is not accurate!)

Edit 3 February 2010: A rather new feature that has been added recently is the 'Anchor Text' functionality. This feature will tell you what the anchor text are in the links pointing back to your site and it can assist you with making sure that your anchor text sends the correct message to Google as to what your site is about. The least useful part of this section is that it does not tell you where those anchor text links are located, so if you pick up an anchor text link that you might want to change, you cannot just directly visit the site to see how the link originated and if there is anything that you can do about it.

Keywords

These are the keywords that Google is associating with your site. You might also find words here that you might not have expected. For example if you have some images that are all named after a person, you might find that Google now associates the name of the person as a keyword with your site.

What can be learned from this therefore is that:

a) Google does not look look at the keywords meta tags on your site at all, it rather scans the site's content and picks up the keywords from there.

b) It is also an indication that it is quite important to name your photos correctly and make use of the opportunity to give the correct message to Google on what your site is about.

The Keywords section of the webmaster tools can therefore assist you with improving your on-site optimisation!

Internal Links

This contains information about which pages internal to your site links to which other pages. I know that a lot of people set a lot of store by getting the internal links correct on a site and you can even manipulate your Page Rank in that way to an extent, but frankly, I have never had the energy or the time to sit and investigate this to its fullest extent. This area is therefore not really that exciting!

Subscriber Stats

This information will only be available if you are making use of Feedburner to publish your feed (Feedburner was acquired by Google some time back).