Making The Most Of The Webmaster Tools
You've spent hours upon hours building and tweaking your website until you're finally proud and satisfied to show it off to the world.
You check daily for the traffic of visitors to wander through, and
praise all your hard work. Days go by, and still only a couple of
people have checked anything out - what's happening?!?
Well, chances are that nobody really knows your site is online. While
it's true that the search engines may eventually stumble upon your site
if it finds a link on another webpage somewhere online, you'll likely
be indexed so low in the listing that very few people will find you.
Let's fix your problem using the huge arsenal of Webmaster Tools you
may have missed the first time around.
We'll break down all the tools into three categories: SEO (Search
Engine Optimization), Site Link Submissions, and Tracking systems.
SEO TOOLS
Though you'll be tempted to send a link for your site into the search
engines (SE) right away, don't do it! Yes the search engines will
accept adding your website to their long waiting list, but you'll be
standing way at the back of the line if you don't prepare your pages
properly first.
Search Engines will actually give a higher priority to accepting pages
that have already done some of the work for them. The first Webmaster
Tool to check into is the Meta Tag Generator. Hopefully you've given
each page a short "Title" (which will appear at the top of the browser
when people look at your page), but we definitely want to include at
least two more Meta tag code types on each individual webpage.
You've spent hours upon hours building and tweaking your website until you're finally proud and satisfied to show it off to the world.
You check daily for the traffic of visitors to wander through, and
praise all your hard work. Days go by, and still only a couple of
people have checked anything out - what's happening?!?
Well, chances are that nobody really knows your site is online. While
it's true that the search engines may eventually stumble upon your site
if it finds a link on another webpage somewhere online, you'll likely
be indexed so low in the listing that very few people will find you.
Let's fix your problem using the huge arsenal of Webmaster Tools you
may have missed the first time around.
We'll break down all the tools into three categories: SEO (Search
Engine Optimization), Site Link Submissions, and Tracking systems.
SEO TOOLS
Though you'll be tempted to send a link for your site into the search
engines (SE) right away, don't do it! Yes the search engines will
accept adding your website to their long waiting list, but you'll be
standing way at the back of the line if you don't prepare your pages
properly first.
Search Engines will actually give a higher priority to accepting pages
that have already done some of the work for them. The first Webmaster
Tool to check into is the Meta Tag Generator. Hopefully you've given
each page a short "Title" (which will appear at the top of the browser
when people look at your page), but we definitely want to include at
least two more Meta tag code types on each individual webpage.
Welcome to the most useful (and most overlooked) devices to pinpoint exactly how your website is succeeding, and where it's failing!
To save yourself hours of time and frustration, use the Pages Indexed tool as your number one guidance to see if the search engines have started indexing your website. You could go to each SE in turn, and try entering the name of your site, but unless it appears on the first or second page, you could spend hours looking for it (if it is even listed yet). The pages indexed will not only let you know which SE have picked up your site, but also which specific pages it has included in its listings.
Want to find out how your keywords or target phrases are doing with the Big-Three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), then do it all in one step using the Position Checker. It will tell you right away how close you are to the top of each SE. If the results show you're way down in the listings, this will be the perfect time to re-optimize your page and keywords for better phrase choices that can get you to a higher ranking position.
Are you getting slaughtered or not showing up for important phrases? Then it's time to spy on your neighbor - which, in this case, is your competitor. Uses the Competitor Analysis to see how they are getting the keyword listings you want. Tweak your site a bit, and you may quickly overtake them.