Google offers something called Webmaster Tools. Do not be alarmed, this is not anything technical that the average Joe could not figure out. It is actually quite simple. You simply need a Google account, which most people already have; here you can set up a webmaster tools account. Google’s webmaster tools is by far the best of the Big 3 Yahoo, MSN/Live also have their own versions of webmaster tools.
Initially what you need to do is add a Meta tag to your site. Google will generate a Meta tag for you, all you’re required to do is cut and paste this information above the body section of your html right below the <head> section. In doing this you’re letting Google know that your the owner of this domain (if you use a Wordpress blog like this, they alternatively offer you the ability to upload an html file, which is simply a blank web page that is named Google80948478734876 example only, do not use this). Once you have proved to the all mighty Google that you are the website or domain owner or webmaster, they will start to show you lots of cool information about your site and about how Google see’s your website.
Once you in here make sure you read my earlier post on sitemap creation and submission. If you have not yet submitted your sitemap to Google, please click on the sitemaps icon, and add it so Google knows about every single page in your site and will in good time index most every page, this is very important for long tail search terms.
OK back to webmaster tools. Once the Meta tag or html file is uploaded, you will need to verify this, this is instantaneous. Google will confirm this, now Google will track lots of cool things, like how many and what pages from your site are indexed (with the Google search results), what the top search queries for your website are, and where you rank in the Google index for various search queries. It will also show you when the last time Google visited your home page, if Googlebot (the name of Google spider) encountered any issues indexing your site, show you a list of all internal links (links within your website that exist) and how many external links your site has (links from other websites to yours).
Lastly Google webmaster tools offers a tools section where you can review your robots.txt file (topic for another day). You can generate a robots.txt file review Google’s crawl rates etc. Lots of neat eye candy. What I look at often is how many pages are within Google’s index, how often Googlebot visits my site and what the top search queries are and in what position my site appears.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Recent Comments