Free Google Website Tools Webmasters Should Know About

If you have a website, there are a number of free tools available for webmasters through Google that are absolutely indispensable in helping you increase your website's visibility and traffic. The Google search engine is one of the most popularly used search tools on the Internet. You can find these tools by going to Google.com and then clicking on business Ranking high in the results for keyword phrases that relate to your products or service is going to increase your traffic and increase your sales. Google provides a number of free tools that help you see exactly how well your website is doing and show you what you need to improve, what pages are not ranking and what is working for you.

Though Google offers a number of different tools for a small fee, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on Google Webmaster Tools. This free service let's you know a number of pieces of valuable information about your website. First, you have to verify that you own the site by adding a specified meta tag to the header of your home page or upload an HTML file. Once you do this, you will be better equipped to optimize your site.

Google Webmaster Tools: Diagnostics

Googlebot is the web crawler that searches the Internet to find relevant pages that match up with the search terms people enter on Google's search engine. The diagnostics section focuses on what Googlebot comes up with when it crawls your site as well as your site's mechanics.

Web Crawl-This shows you if there are any errors or problems that Googlebot encounters when it crawls your site.

Content Analysis-Problems with your site's meta tags, meta titles and descriptive information will show up here.

Mobile Crawl-Problems and errors on pages designed for mobile phone viewing are found here.

Google Webmaster Tools: Statistics

This set of tools focuses on the traffic that is coming to your site and how it is getting there.

Top Search Queries - Find out which keyword terms people are using that generate your site in the results list, the percentage of clicks you got when pages from your site were shown, and what number on the list pages of your site appear in the Google search engine.

Crawl Stats-this shows you a bar graph of how your pages are faring in PageRank as rated when crawled by Google's Googlebot. They are shown as ranking high, medium, low or not yet assigned.

Subscriber Stats-If you have subscriber feeds like RSS or Atom available on your site, this will show you how many subscribers you have to those feeds.

What Googlebot Sees-this shows you what phrases and content are used in external links to your site. It helps if these phrases are related to the content, products and services on your site to help generate the appropriate traffic.

Index Stats-this tool lets you see what pages have links to your site and how your pages are indexed by Google.

Google Webmaster Tools: Links

Pages with External Links-Here you will see which pages on your website have inbound links coming from other websites.

Pages with Internal Links-here you can find out which of your pages have links pointing to them from other pages on your site.

Sitelinks-This shows you which of your links may appear directly in Google's search results.

Google Webmaster Tools: Tools

There are a number of other tools that you can utilize free of charge as well. For example, you can submit a site map with all the pages on your site to expedite the process of including every page in your site on Google's search engine. You can also:

Analyze robots.txt

Generate robots.txt

Set Geographic Target

Enhanced Image Search

Manage Site Verification

Set Crawl Rate

Set Preferred Domain

Remove URLs

Before you invest in any pricey ranking tools or analytic software, check out what Google has to offer for free!

Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate for ApolloHosting.com. She brings years of experience as a small business consultant to helping prospective clients understand the ways in which a website may benefit them both personally and professionally. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting [http://www.apollohosting.com], ecommerce hosting [http://www.apollohosting.com/e-commerce], vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.

Free Webmaster Tools that Need To Know About

If money is a bit tight, or you are just starting out, then making full use of tools freely available on the web is a MUST.

There are plenty of FREE tools out there, you just have know where to look.

Overture's Keyword Selector Tool

( Visit inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion )

One of the first things you need to do with every online project is to find out how many people are searching for that topic.

Overture, now owned by yahoo, gives us this great little tool that shows how many people searched for a particular topic in the previous 30 days, as well as what keywords they used to do that search..

A site well worth book marking.

Blogger - Google Own Blogging Service

( http://www.blogger.com )

Blogger is very easy to use, and if used the correct way can be a great way to get newly developed sites indexed by the search engines.

You can setup as many blogs as you wish post as often as you wish, and say almost anything you want.

Web Site Code checker

( http://validator.w3.org )

These days it's very easy to quickly put up a website using your favorite WYSIWYG HTML editor, but sometimes they can generate absolutely nasty web code, that can make search engines almost choke just trying to read your site.

Just because internet explorer displays the site OK, doesn't mean that the search engines can read your site properly.

So make sure every HTML page you put up on the web is 100%b HTML clean and correct.

Not only will the search engines love you, but so will your bank balance.

Steve's Templates - Free Web Templates

( http://www.steves-templates.com )

Steve's templates provide a whole suite of free web templates that you can import into your HTML editor and edit to fir your website. The template found here are very professional and they cover both personal and business style templates.

SEOPEN.com

( http://www.seopen.com )

This site is a platform for free search engine optimization tools.

It also offers a great little FIREFOX plug-in that allows you to access all the SEO Tools on the site, simply by right clicking on your mouse whilst using FIREFOX.

It allows you to find all sorts of information about a site, such as:

-WHOIS Information

-How many back links the site has

-The Keyword Density on the Page

-Page Size Checker

-HTML validator (uses validator.w3.org see above)

-Check a sites robots.txt

Plus a lot more... If you use FireFox then get this plug-in, I can't live without it any more.

If you don't use FIREFOX then go to http://www.mozilla.com/ and start using it... It's the BEST!!

Open Office

( http://www.OpenOffice.org )

Let me quote directly from their website

"OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute."

Basically Open Office is a FREE alternative to Microsoft Office. It can read and write most if not all the standard Office files.

The aspect I like about it is that its built in wordprocessor (write) can load Microsoft Word documents and then you can save them as standard PDF documents.

This means that you can create your own e-books and reports without having to buy expensive PDF creators.

Give it a go... It's well worth while.

All of the tools I mentioned above are absolutely FREE.

I use almost all of them on a daily basis, so don't waste your hard earned money on expensive tools, use these FREE one.

Bruce Hearder owns and run http://www.WebsiteSecrets101.com

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