Art Dimension Blog » Google tools http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog Graphic design and Web development Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:22:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Google Webmasters Tool and Its Importance http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2010/03/google-webmasters-tool-and-its-importance/ http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2010/03/google-webmasters-tool-and-its-importance/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:24:00 +0000 Art-d http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/?p=118 All of us as website owners and search engine marketers have always wanted to know “How exactly Google sees our website”. This information can be found in Google support tries to help webmasters diagnose errors and enhance their website’s search engine visibility.

Google webmaster tools list the preferences on how website listings are handled.

Before you can start with any of these you will to sign up for your Google account. After signing up log into the following page https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Verification of Ownership

You will have to verify your ownership of your website that you would like to control using Google webmaster tools. You will have to enter the URL of your website and follow the instructions provided to verify the ownership of your website. This can be done in two ways, one is by uploading a blank HTML file with a specified name and the second method is by pasting a Meta tag provided by Google webmaster tools in the Header part of your homepage. Once you upload your blank HTML page or add the Meta tag, click verify.

This will allow Google to verify quickly that you are the authentic owner of the website that you are trying to control using Google webmaster tools.

The Overview

Once verified, you will be able to see your website’s profile in the Google webmaster tools control panel. You just need to click on the URL of your website whose profile you would like to view under the Manage section. This will take you to the overview page. You will find highly crucial information on your website that will give you great insights into the nature of your website’s traffic. You will also find links to specific webmaster tools in this section.

Diagnostics Tools

    The function of these tools is to tell you whether there are any errors in your website as seen by Google when it crawled your website. You will normally find errors such as 404 errors, pages not indexed by Google robots.txt and other indexing issues.

    Some of the common types of errors can be listed under the headings such as HTTP errors, URLs not followed, URLs disallowed by robots.txt, not found, URLs timed out, and Unreachable URLs. To ensure that your website is without any error, you must regularly check your diagnostics reports.

    Statistical Tools

    Google has amazing statistical tools that you can use to improve your marketing efforts. Google webmaster statistical tools include the following:

    Top Search Queries

      Every webmaster would like to know the top search query through which visitors get in to their website using Google Search. You will be able to see list of keywords for which the highest number of visitors came to your website. One of the most important pieces of information that you will find here is that your position in the SERPs for a particular keyword. There may be minor variation in the indicated number and actual position however, this will get better with time.

      What Googlebot Sees

      This is one of the best ways of learning how other websites link to your website . You can find three sections here.

      • Phrases used in external links to your website,
      • Keywords in your site’s content
      • The actual content on your website in terms of keyword density
      • Crawl Stats

      Here you will be able to learn about your website’s pagerank strength. You can see your pages categorized in terms of low, medium, high and not yet assigned. Most often you will find your pages categorized under low but do not get discouraged. Another useful piece of information here is pagerank information of specific pages, which is updated on monthly basis. This is one of the best ways of measuring the effectiveness of your specific link building efforts.

      Index Stats

      Here you can find advanced Google queries on your website that used some search operators. This includes the following operators site:, link:, cache:, info:, related:, etc.

      Subscriber Stats

      This particular tool will help you find the status on your RSS feed subscribers. This is one of the new additions to the toolbox and is certainly useful when you are using feed management systems.

      Links

      This is where you can learn about your website’s internal and external link popularity status. Though this tool is a very limited in terms of the information provided, it will certainly be helpful information when you are trying to work on your website’s online exposure.

      Google Sitemaps

      This is one of the basic and oldest Google webmaster tools. In fact all the Google webmaster tools were built around Google sitemaps tool. This will help you to manage your sitemap files that are Google specific. You will be able to upload XML files, which will help Google to crawl your website completely.

      Tools

      The tools area in Google Webmaster Tools is the most resourceful sections. You can find the following tools under this section:

      Analyze robots.txt

      Robots.txt is a protocol meant for googlebot, which will tell Google how they should go about crawling your website. You can give instructions to googlebot in this file. You can control the crawling of Googlebot to the desired parts of your website as well as block the search engines from crawling certain parts of your website.

      Analyze robots.txt tool will help you check the validity of your robots.txt file. Even a small mistake in this file can cost your website’s ranking dearly. So better take advantage of this tool to ensure that everything is in place.

      Site Verification Management

      This section will help you change the options on your site verification. You will also be able to secure your website. This is highly helpful when you are using a SEO company to handle your webmaster tools. Once you terminate their services with them, your information will still be available to them. Using this site verification area, you can block unauthorized entries to your website.

      Crawl Rate

      Here you will be able to get Google’s activity on your website and their indexing frequency. If you really want to benefit from this section, you will have to select adjust crawling speed feature. Here are few useful tips on how you can benefit from the activity graphs.

      You will have to remember here that will be limited to a 90 day span. You can see variations in the graph based on your website update frequency. Check the graphs closely and compare it with your website activity. You will also be able to measure the effectiveness of your link building efforts. You can see spikes in the graph if your link building efforts have really been effective. The aim here is to make sure that Google is visiting your website frequently and interacting with your website actively. This is important to get new content in your website indexed fast.

      Set Preferred Domain

      If you do not want your page rank and the effectiveness of your link building efforts diluted between www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com, you need to tell Google which will be your canonical URL or which will be your preferred URL. This will have defi nitive impact on your website’s ranking. Google will display the right URLs based on what you have instructed it in this section. Never ignore this section; not many people realize the importance of this section.

      Enhanced Image Search

      One of the ways of enhancing your website’s online presence is by getting yourself included in the image search. When you select enhanced image search you will be able to gain control on labeling images in your website. You can also make use of Google image labeler to help improve image relevancy. You can find Google image labeler at http://images.google.com/imagelabeler.

      Remove URLs

      If there are pages removed in your website in your latest update, you should remove those pages from Google indexing. You will be able to do this easily using the remove URLs tool.

      Concluding Remarks

      When you invest enough time understanding each of the tools available in Google webmaster tools, you will certainly be able to benefit a great deal. All these tools after all are F.R.E.E. for use. Google even allows users to download important information regarding their website. You can set automatic download schedules to have your statistics downloaded. The best download schedule suggested is once in 60 days as Google provides information once in 90 days. When you set 60 days download, you will have overlapping data to interpret the information better.

      The data gathered here can be used in multiple ways to gain valuable insights regarding your website’s online performance.

      ]]>       http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2010/03/google-webmasters-tool-and-its-importance/feed/ 16       Good times with inbound links http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2008/10/good-times-with-inbound-links/ http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2008/10/good-times-with-inbound-links/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:05:07 +0000 Art-d http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/?p=54 Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance. Other signals include things like our analysis of your site’s content, its relevance to a geographic location, etc. As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links your PageRank (one of many factors in our ranking algorithm). And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service.

      How do these signals factor into ranking?

      Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

      Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.

      So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links?

      Many webmasters have written about their success in growing their audience. We’ve compiled several ideas and resources that can improve the web for all users.

      Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general

      • Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.If you’re interested in blogging, see our Help Center for specific tips for bloggers.
      • Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.
      • Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.
      • Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they’re more likely to link to you.

        • For more actionable ideas, see one of my favorite interviews with Matt Cutts for no-cost tips to help increase your traffic. It’s a great primer for webmasters. (Even before this post, I forwarded the URL to many of my friends. :)

      Pursue business development opportunities

      Use Webmaster Tools for “Links > Pages with external links” to learn about others interested in your site. Expand the web community by figuring out who links to you and how they’re linking. You may have new audiences or demographics you didn’t realize were interested in your niche. For instance, if the webmasters for example.com noticed external links coming from art schools, they may start to engage with the art community — receiving new feedback and promoting their site and ideas.

      Of course, be responsible when pursuing possible opportunities in this space. Don’t engage in mass link-begging; no one likes form letters, and few webmasters of quality sites are likely to respond positively to such solicitations. In general, many of the business development techniques that are successful in human relationships can also be reflected online for your site.

      Now that you’ve read more information about internal links, outbound links, and inbound links (today’s post :) , we’ll see you in the blog comments! Thanks for joining us for links week.

      Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

      Check your rank

      ]]>       http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2008/10/good-times-with-inbound-links/feed/ 0       How important is submitting sitemap to google? http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2008/10/how-important-is-submitting-sitemap-to-google/ http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/2008/10/how-important-is-submitting-sitemap-to-google/#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:55:35 +0000 Art-d http://blog.artdimension.ca/blog/?p=53 Years ago, getting back links to a website was the most important factor in SEO, but now, that is not the only important factor. This article explains the use of sitemap in SEO as an essential factor in assisting web crawlers to navigate a website.Here are some hallmarks of a good site map, which helps visitors at finding information quickly on your web site

      • The site map should be the simplest page on your web site.
      • Do not give a fancy name to the site map link such as “Web Site Tree” – keep it as “Site map”, this way your visitors understand immediately what you mean.
      • You should always avoid “dynamic” site maps. Those in which the visitors have to “work” their way to get hold of information. Remember, the reason visitors comes to a site map page is because they are lost. To make them work again for something that you can display as a simple static link will just kill the purpose of having a site map.
      • If the site map is list of text links, be sure to use the TITLE attribute of the anchor tag and include keywords inside it.
      • It is a good idea to put a sentence describing the page contents below the link for that page on a site map.
      • A site map should not be the primary navigation on your web site it should complement it.
      • A link to the site map page is very important and all pages should carry this link. The site map link can be included with other links in the main menu on your web site or placed at a section on the web page from which is it clearly visible.
      • Other important aspects on a web site should complement site maps. For example, the link color for visited links should be different from that of non-visited links so that visitors understand which pages they have already seen and thus, save time.

      Search Engine Optimization. A lot of people are clamoring to know exactly what it is. SEO is the process of enhancing the presence and visibility of a website on search engine listings. Not only is it a process, it is about the tool required to make the enhancement happen. There are two main types of search engine optimization:

      • On page Optimization
      • Off Page Optimization

      When SEO was in its infancy, getting back links to a site was the most important factor. In fact, many books and articles written on the subject will still tell people that getting back links is the only proper way to optimize a website. Back links with proper anchor text, of course.

      After search engine optimization has a chance to mature, SEO specialists became aware that using only back links is not at all the best way to optimize a site. In fact, if an SEO is only creating back links, the site is not getting optimized.

      In On page site optimization, there are techniques and tools that are related to your own website and in OFF page optimization, there are items which are related to the other websites. In On page the old technique was Meta Tag Optimization, appropriate content, Alt tag optimization, proper navigation for the website and much more activities through which changes were made to the website, itself. In OFF page optimization, only back links were created.

      Today, optimization is a little bit different. While usimg the old techniques are still appropriate, creating a Sitemapcan be added to the list. Sitemap is something that came in existence a few years ago.

      A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps, usually called Sitemap with a capital “S”, are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.

      Sitemap is especially important if your site:

      • Has dynamic content
      • Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX
      • Is new and doesn’t have many links
      • Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all

      The use of Sitemap becomes doubly important if the site has pages that can only be accessed through user entry. Sitemap will assist web crawlers in finding and accessing the pages.

      SitemapDoc – Google Sitemap Generator and Editor
      RSS Feed generator

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