Google Webmaster Tools lets you adjust a lot of useful settings of your website that you can’t really set otherwise. Recently Google has added a settings page under Webmaster Tools, which makes it really easy to find all these different setting options under one page.
The site settings that have been added to the new Webmaster Tools Settings page are:
1. Geographic Target – Lets you set your site’s Target Geographic Location. So you run a small local business based on United Kingdom, you can simply set your Target location as “United Kingdom” . This way your site will have higher chance of ranking for your keywords when a user performs a search from UK.
2. Preferred domain control – This lets you choose whether you would prefer to display “www” in your domain or not. This basically changes how your URL is displayed in the Google search results.
3. Opting in to enhanced image search – If you want your site’s images to be found via Google Image Search, you should opt-in for this feature.
4. Crawl rate control – Now Google gives you the ability to set your site’s crawl rate. So if you feel that Google is crawing your site too fast, you can reduce the speed or if you update your content too frequently and you want Google Crawler to come to your site more frequently then you can adjust your crawl rate according to your need. (SEOmoz recently did a test and concluded that changing the crawl rate doesn’t makes any substantial difference to a site.)
Google Webmaster Tools Team will continue to add more options in this dedicated settings page.