Web Master Tools: Another important tool in your SEO tool box
The three largest search engines all provide you into a small look into their inner working. If you are serious about promoting your site you need to be signed to all three of these free services. Signing up for all three services is a must but Google by far gives you the most detailed information out of the three.
Some of the features in Google Webmaster Tools are the following
- Top search queries - Impressions shows what searches your site appears in. Clickthrough shows what searches provided clickthroughs to your site
- Links to your site - What sites are linking to your site
- Sitemaps - Submit your sitemaps and see how many pages Google has indexed
- Keywords - What are the most popular keywords on your site
- Crawl errors - Find out if there are any errors when the crawler receiving your site
- Crawl stats - Gets graphs of pages crawled per day, kilobytes downloaded per day and time spent downloading a page
- HTML suggestions - Look for duplicate tags, missing tags, etc
- Fetch as Googlebot - View your site the way the crawler sees it
- Malware details - Google search now provides built in malware detector. If Google determines there is malware on your site and this section gives you details into this.
Google Webmaster Tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Yahoo! Site Explorer
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Bing - Webmaster Center
Have you taken the blind search engine taste test?
Remember the blind taste test for a soft drink? Well this is a blind taste test for search engines...
With all the fan comparing the benefits of Google VS Yahoo VS Bing it makes you start to question who's side you are really on. That was a problem until the Blind Search came along.
I found this great little site the other day which lets you run a blind test on all three search engines at once. You then get to pick the one you like the best and the site revels what search engine you choose.
Are sitemaps still useful for SEO?
I was speaking with a client the other day who is very tech savvy and also runs a relativity large site. I was very surprised when I asked him how often he submits a new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and I received a response of "Why do you use sitemaps? Aren't they out dated?".
Ok so first and formost I have heard from may people say that sitemaps are no longer required because crawlers can now very quickly visit your entire site. These people will also argue that with proper site design and page structure the crawlers will be able to efficiently get to all the pages on your site without the sitemap.
This all may very well be true... crawlers today are much more robust than they were years ago and proper site structure will make crawling more efficient. It happens that Google, Yahoo, and Bing still give you the ability to submit your sitemap. My take is that even if you belive it will help a small amount or not at all isn't it worth the 5 minute investment? Think about it, if all things are equal and the guy next to use does not use these tools but you do... that may give you the small edge you need to succeed.
I would go so far as to argue that sitemaps are 100% useful for SEO purposes. Sitemaps allow you to tell search engine how often each of your pages gets updated, the last time the page is modified, and the relative priority of the page compared to the rest of the site. They will also guarantee your site to be crawled the most efficiently way possible.
Here are the best places to start to submit your sitemap:
Google Webmaster Tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Yahoo! Site Explorer
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Bing - Webmaster Center
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