Welcome to your guide on the best practices for search engine optimization (SEO). We will be covering how you can make use of free webmaster tools.
Make Googlebot crawling smoother by using Webmaster Tools
Using Google’s Webmaster Tools can increase the effectiveness of your website’s interactions with Google. While these tools won’t guarantee you a boost in the ratings, if used correctly they can contribute to a comprehensive marketing strategy. When you know how to make these tools work for you, your site performance will increase, which will help you rise in the rankings. With Webmaster Tools you can:
- View your site’s crawlability issues
- Report the creation of your XML Sitemap file
- Create robots.txt files and receive detailed analysis
- Remove your URLs once they have been crawled by Googlebot
- Establish a preferred domain
- Detect description meta tag and title issues
- Discover the top search terms for the site
- See how Googlebot’s views webpages
- Eliminate unnecessary sitelinks that you don’t want to appear in Google results
- Request a site reconsideration if necessary and be advised of quality guideline violations
Be sure to check out Bing’s Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer if you prefer to use the Bing or Yahoo free search engine tools.
High-level analysis is possible via Google Analytics
Google Analytics can help you track how your site is improving over time. You can track traffic patterns and gain insight into the performance level of your site. Use Google Analytics to:
- See how users reach your site and what they do once they get there
- Figure out what part of your site is most popular
- Track the positive or negative effect from changing various elements of your site
If you are an advanced user and want to take your Google Analytics use to the next level, you can use the tool to track document interaction on your site as well as keywords that bring users to your pages.
Click here to learn the best practices for promoting your website or here for the introduction to SEO Best Practices.
- If you are struggling with your SEO:
- Determining if you need to be on search engines
- Getting found on search engines
- Getting phone calls and emails leads from your web site
- Where to start with your web site