Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide - Manual (Page 21)

Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide, Version 1.1, 13 Nov 2008, latest version at Google Webmaster Central
Make use of free webmaster tools
Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google's Webmaster Tools
help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from
Google about their site. Using Webmaster Tools won't help your site get preferential treatment; however,
it can help you to identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results.
With the service, webmasters can:
•
see which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
•
upload an XML Sitemap file
•
analyse and generate robots.txt files
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remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
•
specify the preferred domain
•
identify issues with title and description meta tags
•
understand the top searches used to reach a site
•
get a glimpse of how Googlebot sees pages
•
remove unwanted sitelinks that Google may use in results
•
receive notification of quality guideline violations and file for a site reconsideration
Yahoo! ( Yahoo! Site Explorer ) and Microsoft ( Live Search Webmaster Tools ) also offer free tools for
webmasters.
Take advantage of web analytics services
If you've improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Webmasters Tools or other
services, you're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programmes such
as
Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. You can use these to:
•
get insight into how users reach and behave on your site
•
discover the most popular content on your site
•
measure the impact of optimisations that you make to your site (e.g. did changing those title
and description meta tags improve traffic from search engines?)
For advanced users, the information that an analytics package provides, combined with data from your
server log files , can provide even more comprehensive information about how visitors are interacting
with your documents (such as additional keywords that searchers might use to find your site).
Lastly, Google offers another tool, called
Google Website Optimiser, that allows you to run experiments
to find what on-page changes will produce the best conversion rates with visitors. This, in combination
with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools (see our video on using the "
Google Trifecta "), is a
powerful way to begin improving your site.