Web masters can be called the final word in website management. They are also known as website administrator, web architect and web developer. A webmaster can be managing one or more sites. It is a position that has many web related tasks. From website design to monitoring sever, software and hardware operations, a webmaster may take care of it all. The position of a webmaster also demands the knowledge of online payment processing and online security, as many websites have functions of transaction and all website needs online protection. Webmasters also maintain public relations by replying to queries posted by users on a website. A webmaster can use knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, PHP, web server configuration and in case of small websites, web designing. General responsibilities of webmaster includes controlling access of users of a website, managing website navigation, placing the website’s content properly and occasionally creating the websites content.

In recent times, the concept of webmaster has broadened. With expansion of the horizon, a webmasters job is not anymore limited to technical jobs related to a website, but applying SEO techniques as well to take of marketing, advertising etc. Many companies these days offer web development i.e. web site designing and content, along with marketing services, mostly SEO.

Google has taken a great initiative to help webmasters around the world. It has come out with a facility that is a no-charge web service known as Webmaster tools. Webmasters can check out the status of indexing and the visibility of their websites after optimization.

Webmaster tools allow webmasters to perform a list of tasks-

Submission and checking of a sitemap

fixing the crawl rate, and understanding how Googlebot works while accessing a site

Creating a robots.txt file. It allows finding about pages that are somehow blocked in robots.txt.

Listing of internal and external pages linked to the web site.

Find out about the keyword searches that helped the site to be listed in the Search Engine Result Pages, and also know about the rates of such listings.

Learn about the process of the indexing of the site at Google. Know whether any errors were found while doing it.

Put a preferred domain name. This helps to decide how the site URL will be shown in the Search Engine Result Pages

These tools are important for the process of webmaster verification. One can verify a website by using Webmaster tools through two processes. One is with the help of Meta tags and the other is by creating a blank HTML file. Google provides a Meta tag. You have to put that in the index file before the tag. Nothing more is required to verify. This process is used by most webmasters for being simple. In the other process, you will have to collect a name from Google and create a HTML file in your sites root directory. You can leave it blank as only the location and name is required. Once the verification is complete, Google will regularly check on that file or the tag. If they are not in place, the verification will be cancelled.