Google not only has the most popular search engine, but they also have dozens of really useful and completely free utilities. If you are responsible for the success of a website, then there are two Google tools that you should absolutely be using right now.
Google Analytics
The first tool, Google Analytics, lets you get valuable information about the web traffic coming to your web site. Create a new Google account, if you do not already have one. After that, login to Google Analytics and click the Add Website Profile link. You can monitor multiple web sites at once, but you must be able to paste code into the web pages in order to prove ownership. This prevents you from being able to access site statistics for web sites that do not belong to you (such as your competitors).
You will need to paste the code Google Analytics provides into all of your web pages. The code should be pasted at the top of the document, within the tag. After adding a new web site profile, you will need to wait at least one day before you can start viewing data. Once the data is available and your tracking code has been confirmed, you should see a green checkmark next to the web site profile name.
When you click the web site profile name, you will be brought to the Dashboard page. This gives you a quick overview of your web site. You can drill down into each of the sections on the Dashboard page. Go through each one and examine the data. The more you look at this stuff, the more it is going to make sense to you. Do not be overwhelmed by what you see. After looking at this a few times, it will start making more sense.
You are most interested in the number of unique visitors. Your goal, of course, is to see this number steadily rise. If you do something that you think will increase traffic to your site, wait for a few days and then look at Google Analytics to confirm that there was an actual increase. If there was not, then you may need to change your strategy.
Google Web Master Tools
As with Google Analytics, Google's Web Master Tools will require you to verify site ownership. You do this by either pasting a Meta tag that Google provides in your main web page or by uploading an HTML file that they provide.
Once you paste the code in your index.html page or upload the HTML page they provide, you can click Verify. Once the site is verified, you will be brought to the Dashboard page. Now you can see what top search queries brought visitors to your site. This can help you identify whether you are using the right keywords.
You will also see whether there were any crawl errors. Crawl errors can occur when the search engine is attempting to read through your web site and index the content. These errors can cause you to lose valuable web traffic, so you want to make sure you immediately resolve any issues that Google identifies.
The data displayed in the Web Master Tools reflects data collected the last time your web site was crawled. Google does not crawl your web site every day, so it is possible that the data on the dashboard will not perfectly match the data you see in Google Analytics.
To quickly determine whether your site is being indexed, type "site: yourdomainname" into a Google search box. For example, to find out if theweb site is indexed, I need to enter "site:site name" into a search box. If you do this and get back no results, then you know your site has never been indexed.
As long as your web site does not violate any of Google's rules or use deceptive practices, it will be crawled in time. However, if you can't wait or you have recently made major changes to your site, you can submit a sitemap.
You do this through the Web Master Tools by expanding Site Configuration and clicking Sitemaps. The sitemap is a text-based file that contains Extended Markup Language (XML) tags. Do not worry if you know nothing about XML. You don't have to.
There are plenty of tools available, both free and for sale, which will build this file for you. I have had success using the trial version of Inspyder Sitemap Creator 2.0 and this will work fine if you have a small website (less than 25 pages). Once installed, you can generate a sitemap in a few minutes by simply typing in the name of your web site and clicking Go.
You can choose to exclude certain files and then generate your sitemap by clicking Create Sitemap. Alternatively, you can click Create and Upload and this will upload the sitemap directly to your web site. However, before you can do this, you will need to specify the FTP settings (username, password, URL, and remote folder name) for your web server. Once the sitemap file has been uploaded to the web server, you can use the Web Master Tools to submit the sitemap.
There is a very good reason Google's main page only contains a search box and two buttons; a page like this loads very fast. This has been one of the key factors in Google's success. If you expand the Labs link in Web Master Tools and click Site performance, you will see a page which indicates how well your site is performing. It is important that you check this and make sure your pages are not rendering slowly. This can affect your Google page ranking negatively.
It is a good idea to set aside one hour a week to reviewing the data provided with Analytics and the Web Master Tools. The easiest thing to do is just make it a Sunday night or Monday morning ritual. If you are consistent with monitoring your web site and making adjustments accordingly, your site will grow.
Sara Morgan is the author of "No Limits: How I escaped the clutches or Corporate America to live the self-employed life of my dreams". As a professional web developer for the past 12 years, she knows a thing or two about web sites. She has just completed a do-it-yourself guide for non-techies that want to build their own professional looking websites for very little money. You can sign-up to download the FREE guide from her company's website at http://www.custsolutions.net.
No comments:
Post a Comment