Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Google Webmaster Tools is available free to all webmasters who have registered a site with Google. The tools can be used to monitor your site’s efficiency, check for errors, show you what needs repair and help you optimize for best usability and traffic.

First on the list is Google Webmaster’s error report - this will show errors like non-followed URLs, broken links, un-crawled areas of your site, etc. This can help you see which links are not working or that point to pages you have retiresd, and also shows you what pages are not being indexed.

The site defaults function lets you tell Google whether you want your page shown with the www or without. It also enables you to use geographic targeting, and activate image labeler so your images will show up in image searches.

You can obtain a list of URLs with duplicate title tags or duplicate meta descriptions, as well as find out if some of the ones you have are too short or too long.

You can find top search queries in a number of locations, but having this available in Google Webmaster Tools is just another plus. You can see what people are clicking on, and your ranking for each search term, as well as breaking it down by type of search (web, image, mobile) or by country.

You can manage sitelinks if you are lucky enough to get them - you may not be able to add pages on a whim, but you can ask that ones Google selects be excluded if you have the need.

With JavaScript embedding capabilities, Google can juice up your 404’s with a search box and maybe keep visitors from bouncing away from your site. Google can also try to guess what the user was looking for based on what Google has indexed in your site.

These and even more features of Google Webmaster Tools are being added daily, so check out the options you have to improve your site even more!

There is no excuse not to maximize the value you get out of your web analytics. Still, most people barely scratch the surface of their web analytics tools. If you look at your own web analytics data you know how well you are doing right now. You have to compare these numbers to others taken over time to have a clear picture, and then you have to compare them to other sites in your category!

By enabling benchmarking in Google Analytics, you can see the metrics for competing sites. These benchmarks let you see areas of opportunity for you to beat out these competitors. Benchmarks are available for Visits, Bounce Rates, Page Views, Average Time on Site, Page Views Per Visit and Percent of New Visits. You can also choose the category of your web based business by drilling vertically: Computers & Electronics -> Internet Software -> Content Management.

Internal site search data is where you find out what your visitors REALLY want, based on the queries they type in the search engine. This can help you understand visitor intent and identify new opportunities to improve landing pages, cross-promote products, and adjust your marketing and advertising strategy.

Hiring a web analysts is fine, but they will tend to focus on referrers and campaigns - when they say ’search’ they mean paid search. Organic search analysis is usually passed over or shuffled off on a newbie, or given the bare minimum of attention. This is a mistake. Organic search is free, has great ROI over the long term, and can actually serve as the foundation of a great paid search strategy. Don’t forget landing pages - analyzing and optimizing these can make all the difference. Your first impression may always be your last, so make it count.

Analyzing things like straight ROI on ad campaigns is important. So is raw number of visitors, etc, but the more time you spend learning how to use your analytics tools, the more you will know about your site and the more targeted you can become when planning campaigns and marketing strategies.

If you notice one area of your site has a lower amount of return than another, some webmasters might scrap the whole section and try something else. With analytics, you can pinpoint where what money that does come in is trickling from, pare away the deadwood, and build around that live core for a well optimized traffic attracting site.

Don’t ignore analytics. They can be your very best friend.

Google has listed a dozen tools that can help your site shine like a beacon through the wilderness of the web. Granted, they name a lot of their own tools, but the advice is sound nonetheless - and all you have to do to prove their usefulness is to give them a try!

First on the list is a basic step that many newer webmasters don’t know to try out. Simply search for your site name using the command ‘site’ - in other words, type “site: name of your site .com”. When it comes up, you can look at your snippet (what shows on the search results) and your page titles to see what you might need to change for best user experience and attractiveness. You can also use the content analysis tool from Google Webmaster Tools for more details.

Sitemaps with a refresh rate are the fastest way to get new content crawled by Google, according to their team. This can help if you add pages quickly (daily or weekly).

You need to label every image appropriately to ensure you don’t miss out on showing up for Google Image Search. Instead of [001jpg] make sure your images scan as what they represent, hopefully utilizing a keyword or two: [blue puppy hoodies].

Google may not always serve up the best site links, so remember you can go in and alter these to represent your site in the best, most user friendly way possible.

Check for keyword traffic, errors, bad links and other problems using Google’s diagnostic checklist in Webmaster Tools.

Make sure your redirect properly by serving accurate HTTP status codes; a retired page should serve a 404, and a relocated page a 301. This will enable Google to find your new pages faster.

Organic content. Organic content. Organic content. There is really nothing to add to that except that you need it!

Finally, use what Google offers. Read the SEO Starter Guide. Watch the Webmaster Tutorials. Utilize the Webmaster Tools. Read the Central Blog. Ask questions and find answers at the Webmasters Help Center and Group.

If you take advantage of all of these tools, you can make your site one of the best out there. There are dozens more tools you can use from Google; these are just a start. You don’t want to neglect other engines, but Google needs a lion’s share of your attention, so paying heed to their advice is just good business practice!

I just discovered Google Base. Where has this been hiding? At first glance, it looks like a addendum to Google for the purpose of basically flea-marketing your unwanted goods, but no - you can post PDF files, articles, etcetera - all with links back to your url.

They key? Attributing, which is pretty much like tagging in the sense that certain things begin to be grouped and categorized by how well you tag. I have got to try this out and see if it makes a difference. I can’t help but wonder, if Google displays these on Product Search or their general search engine, what criteria do they use, and why?

What if I write a lot of articles about working from home? Might I start popping up on search merely because I tag cleverly? What a quickie way to SEO - between Google Base and Knol I might be home free.

I’m probably oversimplifying the whole process. I’m sure Google Base isn’t set up purely for my benefit - I just haven’t pinned down yet what the real aim might be. I don’t quite buy the ‘this is a freebie from us to you’ Google party line - and am suspicious.

And they do make a point of saying your product or items may appear on Google main web search, so I’m sure they have thought of scenarios where that might conceivably happen. Be nice to be in on the secret…

Upon further investigation, Google Base may have some merit all of its own just as a product search. I can’t for the life of me puzzle out how exactly Product Search works, but it looks as though Google has managed to come up with yet another pet project that mimics already existing programs, just so they can be accused of playing favorites to their own creation.

Some serious tinkering around is apparently needed to discover just how Google Base stands up against competitors, and where results from the program might land on the SERPs.

A notation also reads that ‘you don’t have to have a website to use Google Base - just a Google account (of course). Anything you submit to Google base without a url will be hosted on a special url. What does THAT mean? I’m curious, now, and will investigate at first opportunity. I just have to determine what item or product would be the best trial for this Google appendage.

Give me time, I’ll puzzle it out - or feel free to let us know your forays into Google Base - do they wear camouflage? Go on training exercises? Do you have to drop and give ‘em fifty?

Or is it just a gathering of folks at the flea circus outside the trailer park, trading old ‘Vettes and passing a bottle of Jack under the light of a haphazardly strung bulb? Is there anything of substance, here, or is it just Google’s relentless need to know, organize and categorize everything that this is all about?

Most of us would already be using Google Analytics but not all of us put this free tool into maximum use possible. Google has made this tool available for webmasters for free since 2005. It is a magic tool that helps small businesses with its sophisticated statistics about a website’s traffic. These statistics are available under three types and they are Webmaster, Marketer and Executive reports. Each type has their own sub-categories which can be used to have a clear understanding about the nature of visitors to a particular website. These reports will show the general visitor trend in our website and will also help the webmaster to identify the weaker areas of their marketing strategies.

Using Google analytics tool webmasters can find out how many people visited their website and for what keywords, how they entered the website, what they were looking for in your website etc. These free reports will also keep track of your ad campaigns and the effectiveness of the ad campaigns. By closely following the statistics you can devise marketing strategies to market your website online.

You will be able to generate reports on visitor traffic based on various parameters that will give insights into behavior of the visitors. We will be able to track when your visitor traffic is high and when it is low in terms of the days of the week and hours of the day. If you have online chat support to your website or a toll free number you can strengthen the support team and make them concentrate on the peak hours when your website traffic is high to increase the conversion rate.

By reviewing how your website visitors use your site their entry and exit points you can revamp your site to increase the conversion rates and to make those visitors into customers. You will also be able to track where exactly your website visitors leave your site during the sign up process. The ratio of successful signups vs. unsuccessful signups should prompt you to take preventive measures to increase the signups and to decrease the number of unsuccessful signups. Probably it is some particular data that you are asking from your website visitors during signup process that make them leave the signup page. You can design a new signup page that overcomes all the problems that you identify interpreting the report generated by Google.

You can also improve the number of hits by reinforcing the top five keywords that are used by visitors who come to your website. You need to make continued efforts to retain the visitor traffic for the keywords for which you are strong because your competitors constantly working to steal your traffic so unless you continue to strengthen your optimization strategies for those websites you can easily lose traffic within a short time. This is one of the mistakes made by many webmasters; once they see that they are strong for a particular set of keywords they stop all their efforts in strengthening your website for those keywords for continued traffic making their success a short lived one.

Thus Google Analytics can go a long way in helping you with your SEO strategies. It is absolutely free and you just need to make use of it.

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