Find Out How Your Site Is Shaping Up
If you're the proud owner of a website, you'll want to check on how well it's doing in Google from time to time. Although the Search Engine Optimization situation is always fluid, Google continues to play an important role in the success or otherwise of all our online forays.
Personally, I never use Adwords or any other pay per click type servive - I only rely on natural or organic searches to get visitors to my sites, so Google means a lot to me.
One of the tools I use is to make sure all of my web sites are progressing is Google's Webmaster Tools service. In the event you haven't yet started to use this service, read on.
Personally, I never use Adwords or any other pay per click type servive - I only rely on natural or organic searches to get visitors to my sites, so Google means a lot to me.
One of the tools I use is to make sure all of my web sites are progressing is Google's Webmaster Tools service. In the event you haven't yet started to use this service, read on.
Benefits of Google Webmaster Tools To You . . .
If You Think 'Oh No! Not Webmaster Tools!' - Let's Review Why This Exercise is Worth It!
Let's list the reasons to add all your websites, one by one, to Google's Webmaster Tools.
- Information in One Handy Place Google will list all the pages on your site that it has indexed. Now this information is available elsewhere, but with Webmaster Tools, this plus other exclusive information, is available in one place. This is handy if you run a number of sites.
- No More Indexing Mysteries Google is an important index, using Webmaster Tools is a direct way to say to Google, my site exists, please add them to your index. Now you'll can be sure, if all your pages are not indexed, it's not because Google didn't know they were there.
- Sitemaps - Tell Google About All Your Pages Google employs a bot called Googlebot whose job it is to crawl all over your site when you're not looking. If your site doesn't link every page clearly, Googlebot might miss a couple of pages, and that's BAD. If you use Webmaster Tools you get the chance to tell Googlebot where all of your pages are, individually.
You'll also have information about the last time your site map was accessed, and you can ask to have Google take another look at your site map, anytime. Useful if you just added new content.
This is especially useful if you have the type of website that does not lend itself well to search engine crawl. For example if you have a site with menu implemented in Flash or Javascript. What are you waiting for?! - Have Some Pages Ignored allows you to specify a site map of all the pages on your site. Equally you can tell Googlebot to ignore certain pages too, via the special site map you upload to Webmaster Tools. You might ignore pages that you are login pages, or perhaps those that you find a little embarrassing!
- Site Errors Googlebot will get to know your site like the back of its hand once its had a chance to go walkabout all over it. And there is no-one better to tell you where all the linking errors are. These are reported in Webmaster Tools.
- Backlinks Count Webmaster Tools will tell you precisely how many pages out there, link to your home page, and, separately from that, they'll tell you how many pages out there link to other pages in your site. Now this is part of the data Google uses to determine the Page Rank of each of your pages.
The data given here is more complete that data provided by Google's link: operator that you may have used. - Backlink Text You know it is important for SEO reasons to have links back to you contain relevant keyword terms. Well, it's hard to influence that, but now at least you can see what people are using in their backlinks.
- URL Removal You can use Webmaster Tools to remove a page from Google's index that has already been indexed but that you now wish wasn't.
- Top Query Strings Webmaster Tools will tell you what people have been typing in to find your site over various different periods of time. It also shows you this information complete with exactly which position of Google's search results your terms appeared on. You can also look at google.com results only, google.co.uk only and other location specific googles as well.
- Image SearchYou can use Webmaster Tools to say, "Hey Google, index my images too". If your site has great images you can use them to further enhance the visibility of your website. Set the enhanced image search up in Webmaster Tools and then, make sure you have full image descriptions (with relevant keywords) in the alt attribute of each image. For completeness, also add a title attribute so the user can see further information about the image if they want to. It all helps Google index you better.
- Content Analysis A very useful and recent addition to Webmaster Tools is the content analysis function. Here they highlight issues that may make it difficult for Google to crawl and index pages your pages. This is essentially the starting point for your on-page SEO improvement to do list.
- There are more good reasons, but I'm getting a bit tired . . . are you still with me??
Pay Per Click - It Has it's Place
You can use Pay Per Click advertising to create even more visitors for your site. Be careful though to ensure you are getting value for money. There must be a return on investment. In other words - you must make more than you spend via Pay Per Click.
Steps To Getting A Webmaster Tools Account
Sorry there are so many . . . but once I start . . .
Step 1
You will need a Google account. You'll have one of these if you already have a gmail account or actively use any other form of Google tool. Alternatively, you could create a new Google Account if you wanted to.
Step 2
Visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools, and if you haven't done so already register for a Google Webmaster Tools Account, and sign in.
Step 3
Once signed in, you'll be able to add your web site address as shown, and click on the Add Site button. I've added seosquirrel.com, a new site which I have only just started to write. But you'll of course add your own site.
I'd like to point out that I am getting my site set up with Google Webmaster Tools long before it's ready to start receiving traffic. I am applying the Slow Launch Principle to this site. The idea is you launch a new site as soon as you have built the first couple of pages. Don't try to wait until the whole thing is finished before putting it up onto the web.
Step 4
This is what you'll see next. Note that Google tells you when it last had its bot crawl your site. In my case this was Nov 28 2007. (You can tell from that information alone that the site is pretty inactive as that was a couple of months ago.)
Note also that Google says pages form my site are in the Google index, (oh good).
And also, we are being asked to verify the site. If you click on the link, you'll be given two ways to achieve this.
Site verification means that other people won't be able to look at some of the more meaningful statistics that Google Webmaster Tools has to offer.
Step 5
Having clicked on the Verify your site link, you must select a verification method (I selected an uploaded HTML file), and eiher upload that file or else add a special meta tag to the head of the site's home page.
This is what I saw before I chose to upload the HTML file.
Step 6
After I uploaded the verification file to the web server, I clicked on the verify link, and immediately got this page back.
You can see that the page has successfully verified, the site has pages indexed by Google and that there are some bad links on the site and two pages restricted by robots.txt.
You will need a Google account. You'll have one of these if you already have a gmail account or actively use any other form of Google tool. Alternatively, you could create a new Google Account if you wanted to.
Step 2
Visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools, and if you haven't done so already register for a Google Webmaster Tools Account, and sign in.
Step 3
Once signed in, you'll be able to add your web site address as shown, and click on the Add Site button. I've added seosquirrel.com, a new site which I have only just started to write. But you'll of course add your own site.
I'd like to point out that I am getting my site set up with Google Webmaster Tools long before it's ready to start receiving traffic. I am applying the Slow Launch Principle to this site. The idea is you launch a new site as soon as you have built the first couple of pages. Don't try to wait until the whole thing is finished before putting it up onto the web.
Step 4
This is what you'll see next. Note that Google tells you when it last had its bot crawl your site. In my case this was Nov 28 2007. (You can tell from that information alone that the site is pretty inactive as that was a couple of months ago.)
Note also that Google says pages form my site are in the Google index, (oh good).
And also, we are being asked to verify the site. If you click on the link, you'll be given two ways to achieve this.
Site verification means that other people won't be able to look at some of the more meaningful statistics that Google Webmaster Tools has to offer.
Step 5
Having clicked on the Verify your site link, you must select a verification method (I selected an uploaded HTML file), and eiher upload that file or else add a special meta tag to the head of the site's home page.
This is what I saw before I chose to upload the HTML file.
Step 6
After I uploaded the verification file to the web server, I clicked on the verify link, and immediately got this page back.
You can see that the page has successfully verified, the site has pages indexed by Google and that there are some bad links on the site and two pages restricted by robots.txt.
Improve Your Search Visibility . . .
. . . Then check your progress with Webmaster Tools
Now I want to round up with some general information expressed in videos. All of this is relevant to those of us interested in SEO and search engine visibility.Here, that famous Google Guy, Matt Cutts. I've selected a number of useful videos that it would pay all of us to take on board.
The video on where snippets (the little bit of descriptive text that Google shows on its listing when people type a term into the search engine), come from.
The video on where snippets (the little bit of descriptive text that Google shows on its listing when people type a term into the search engine), come from.
Matt Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags
Matt Cutts Discusses Webmaster Tools
What Should SEO's Focus in 2008 - Matt Cutts Answers
Matt Cutts 3 step process to building up a really good site
Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets
Search Engine Submission - Bah!
Don't bother! No need as Google and most others work their way around the web anyway via LINKS.
Better to use Webmaster Tools Sitemaps, AND link to your site from a blog. That is the fastest way I know to get indexed - fast.
Reader Feedback
Got any comments or questions? Add them here!
csharpuniversity wrote...
Elizabeth,
How can google verify a Squidoo lens? Any idea?
Posted March 17, 2009
Lensmaster
Jeck wrote
Hi. thanks for useful information. I learnt about the sitemaps recently and decided to find a simple and intuitive software for my website. Finally stick with sitemap writer pro! This powerful webtool generated the sitemap for my website in just seconds. Mayor search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Moreover) were able to index and read my sitemaps without any problems.
http://www.sitemapwriter.com/
Posted November 25, 2008
Chadrew wrote...
Nice lens! Should be very useful for a newbie. I've been using Google Webmaster Tools for a while and they're really handy.
Posted August 30, 2008
Lensmaster
zangworld wrote
You did it again!
I will get around to using that tool too...
Thanks
George
Posted April 05, 2008
stormyweather wrote...
No problem better-yourself. Is there anything else I cold add to make it more helpful? Please let me know.
Posted February 13, 2008
Links to Help You Get Started With Topics Discussed Here
Go on . . . you know you can do it
Here are some links that should help you get started with Webmaster Tools. Good Luck!
- Webmaster Tools
- This is the link to Webmaster Tools, sign up here to get started.
- Google Webmaster Guidelines
- Some people think Google is evil and that they shouldn't try to tell you what to do with your web site. The truth is you can do what you like with your site, but if you don't adhere to the Google Guidelines, you probably won't feature too well in their index. The choice is ours.
- Sitemap Generator
- A place to generate a Google compatible, XML sitemap for free (if you've less than 500 pages on your site). I use this all the time.
by stormyweather
Hi - My name is Elizabeth and I'm a UK based web developer who likes to learn, discuss, socialise, cook and code. (more)
