Is your web site Google friendly? How do you know?
Everyone with a web site wants to be listed in search engines such as Google – search engines can bring you a lot of new traffic and help people to find you. But if someone does a search for your site or a topic that you have written about your site needs to be on the first few pages of search results. If your site is buried on page 1026, no one is going to find you.
So what can you do to increase your “page rank”? Well, a whole industry – called Search Engine Optimization – has been built around that question, and I’m not going to get into that here. But in order to optimize your site it is helpful to know how Google sees your site.
Enter Google Webmaster Tools. They are free! And it’s relatively easy to sign up. Basically, these tools are a package that provide you with stats and error info about your web site and allow you to submit a sitemap to Google – which ensures that Google will crawl all the pages on your website.
First and foremost, in order to use Google Webmaster Tools you must have a Google account. Luckily, that is free too. Just go to www.google.com/mail and sign up.
Once your account is set up go to www.google.com/webmasters/. This will bring you to Google Webmaster Central. Check to see if your site is currently indexed by Google (just do a Google search for site: your website URL). If it is not currently indexed then go to www.google.com/addurl.html and submit your site.
You are almost there. In order to view stats and errors about your site using these tools you must first verify your site. Google wants to make sure that you are the owner of the site and not some other snooping busybody. To do this you must add a META tag to your site’s home page or upload an html file. Google walks you through it, so it is not too difficult.
OK, now that you are all set up and verifed, you can access your stats and errors and submit a sitemap if you so wish. Google does a good job of explaining their webmaster tools via their help section. I have provided some links to informative explanations.
Dashboard Page
When you first access the webmaster tools you will be on your dashboard page. This lists all your sites, gives you link to add a sitemap, and shows you whether the site is verified. When you click on any one of your sites you will be taken to your summary page for that site.
Summary Page
This page tells you when Googlebot last crawled your site and whether pages from your site are inclded in Google’s index. There are four horizontal tabs to choose from (I know, there are only three in the picture, apparently the links tab has been after this screenshot was taken) – Diagnostic (which is where you currently are), Statistics, Links, and Sitemaps.
Diagnostic Tab
On the diagnostic tab you are given a vertical menu which includes choices for crawl errors, tools that include robots.txt analysis, managing site verification, preferred domain, enhanced image search, and URL removals.
Statistics Tab
This page gives you your crawl stats (including the PageRank of your pages in Google based on a high, medium, and low distribution). You also find your query stats here – this tells what search terms people have used to find you and what position within the search that your page was located. Page analysis and index stats are also included here.
Links Tab
The Links tab provides you with a list of external links – pages within your web site that contain links to other web sites, and a list of internal links – pages within your website that link to other pages within your website.
Sitemaps Tab
Here you can submit a sitemap and see information about your submitted sitemaps. This tool is probably very useful to large sites that have many pages. Google even has a tool called Google Sitemap Generator which will create a sitemap for your URL. There are also third party programs that will help you to create a sitemap.
Google Webmaster Tools FAQ are also very helpful.
This post was written as part of the eMoms at Home To Do Wish List Group Research Project. Thank you Wendy, I look forward to reading all the submissions and crossing a few items off my to do list as well!
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thanks again Neena, I don’t know where you find the time! I’m grateful for what you discover!
Now I must figure out the meta tag.
Got it! yeah@!
Good news! It can be frustrating when you code it exactly as you should and it still doesn’t work.
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