If you want to learn more about how fast your site loads, then you’ll want to check out a new feature from Google Webmaster Central. It’s appropriately (and a bit vanilla-y) called Site Performance and right now it’s an experimental feature.

It will measure the speed of your site and then make suggestions for a quicker load time.

The site speed stats are provided via aggregated data gathered from users who have the Google Toolbar installed – and have opted into enhanced features. Sites with low traffic levels won’t be able to use this feature because of the way data is collected.

Google has updated the Keywords user interface in Webmaster Tools. The update includes:

• Daily data updates
• Details on how often specific keywords were found
• Displaying up to 10 URLs that contain a keyword
• Significance column comparing each keyword’s frequency to the most popular keyword’s frequency

This tool really helps you know how Google sees your site. You can quickly recognize problem areas or address hacked content.

Have you checked out the new user interface? Let us know your first impressions of the update by leaving a comment.

Google is releasing into Webmaster Tools Labs a couple of features that help you view things from their angle. The two features are “Fetch as Googlebot” and “Malware Details.”

Fetch as Googlebot lets you view your web pages as Google’s famous indexing spider. This will answer a question Google (and SEOs) gets asked ALL. THE. TIME.

Malware details show you code snippets on your website that Google has determined are malicious. The goal is to help streamline the often tedious process of ridding your site of malware.

Google has released these features into Labs because they want feedback from users before they release it as official features in Webmaster Tools.

What do you think of these new Webmaster Tools Labs features? Let us know by leaving a comment.

The Google Webmaster Central team has developed a new feature to assist with duplicate content issues. It’s called parameter handling and it allows you to tell Google what to ignore or pay attention to when it comes to indexing your site.

This is great for the SEO that doesn’t have quick access to add code regarding duplicate content to a website. However, these parameters will be treated as “hints” by Google. Getting that code or URL rewrites into your website are still ultimately important.

The Google Webmaster Central team has made some changes to a couple of the website verification methods in Webmaster Tools. Here’s what you need to know:

Meta Tag Verification – Previously, this had to be associated with an email address in your Google account. Obviously, changing email addresses could pose verification issues. Now, the meta tag verification does not require an email address.

HTML File Verification – The change here has to do with the use (or lack thereof) of 404 error pages for non-existent URLs on websites. Websites that didn’t use 404s couldn’t use the HTML file verification. Just upload the new HTML file that Google Webmaster Central provides for verification.

If you’re using third-party software or sites that upload the meta tags or HTML files for you, be sure to check if they’ve updated to work with the new methods.

It’s easy to think of online video as an social media method, but they’re increasingly having search value. After all, most videos don’t go viral, but they are still useful for the niches that you’ve created them for. That’s where search comes into play.

Google is offering up help for getting your videos better indexed. The Google Webmaster Central has announced support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa for video indexing. These formats offer up information about videos, such as title and description, in the HTML for a video page.

Be sure that your rich snippets are indeed included in the HTML and not executed by JavaScript or Flash in order to be indexed.