Google Webmasters Central for SEO Technicians

Well, the SEO technician takes care of the technical of search engine optimization process. Basically, the on-site and on-page stuff such as search engine crawlability, broken links and other nut-and-bolt to ensure the search engine robots/spiders can have a smooth ride within your website and a lot things that webmaster must knows and concerned about.

Google Webmasters Central is one of the best tool for the webmaster/SEO technician to audit your website and understand how your visitors, both humans and robots, interact with each of your web pages. If you do not have an account yet, you must go register now. All you need is a GMail account (drop me a comment if you need one).

Here’s the URL to Google Webmasters Central:

• www.Google.com/webmasters/

Webmasters Tools (including Sitemaps) is my favorite and most used. I use this tool to monitor and analyze my web pages. I used this information to fix 404 error and broken links. What I like best is the Statistic>Query Stats report which shows me the keywords search and the average top position of my page.

Look at the image below. This is the query report of a website that give away free Chinese cooking recipes. You will see that my website is being searched for the keywords: Chinese recipes, authentic Chinese recipes and healthy Chinese recipes and so on.

But more importantly, it the top search query clicks that tell me people who search for Chinese recipes will be more likely to visit my website than those who search for authentic Chinese recipes.

There is another interesting report, Statistics>Page Analysis which I can analysis the content of my website from the keywords perspective then do further related keyword research and tweak the density of the keywords to achieve higher ranking with the understand from the Query Stats.

Google Sitemaps Submission

Even though I can submit sitemaps to get Googlebot to visit my web pages, I don’t see that need yet. Reasons being my websites are relatively small, most of them consist of less than 100 pages and none exceeds 1,000 pages yet.

So with a well designed and linked site architecture, all my pages will be discovered by the search engines spiders anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.