Webmaster Tools From Google

One of the best webmaster tools available for free on the web is certainly provided by Google. Google provides many fantastic tools of which most webmasters are unaware. Worse still, some webmasters realize the tools exist but haven't investigated them. The ones who don't make the most of these Google webmaster tools are at a considerable disadvantage to those who do use them. The first step is to register for an account with Google. Once you've done that you need to open one of their Adwords accounts. You'll need the Adwords account in order to access the most powerful Google tools, so you should open one even if you don't foresee that you'll need to place any Adwords advertisements.

The general public knows that the search engine Google offers a free keyword suggestion tool to aid you in finding key words that relate to your business. Research in keywords is basic to almost every part of internet business. If you don't think about this part of internet marketing then you probably will not be successful. The keyword suggestion tool can be quickly located by doing a search for "Google keyword suggestion" and clicking to the Google page at the beginning of the search results.

Also next is their site analytics software that is a very powerful tool. You can track visitors to your site with this amazing tool; however you need an Adwords account for this. Data such as how they found you and whether they are turning into customers and/or prospective leads on your site can be gathered with this tool. The same kind of software from others can cost you hundreds of dollars and they are not half as user friendly and powerful. For any serious webmaster, this software is an absolute must.

The last software we address, but by no means the least important, is the suite of webmaster tools. These tools give you up-to-date information on any problems with your pages, the number of pages contained in your index, and a detailed compilation of every page on the internet that links to your pages. This list can help you establish why your page ranks well or poorly for search terms that you think are appropriate to your company. This fairly new addition to Google's software offerings is probably the most important software that google has ever released. It has been highly effective and I recommend it very strongly.

You can get a free copy of my latest ebook by clicking here: The 7 Keys To Business Marketing Success [http://www.bizraves.com]. Eric Menzies writes about Search Engine Marketing Firm and much more at http://www.BizRave.com

How to Access Your Website Data in Google Webmaster Tools

Google webmaster tools can give you lots of useful information about your website and about relationship between Googlebot and your website. Read this article about the way how to access your website data in Google webmaster tools.

First, log in your Google webmaster tools account and click the "Add a site" button. The small form field will appear. Enter the URL of your website to this field and click "Continue" button.

In the next step you will need to prove that you have the right to access the data which google gathers about your domain. There are two ways how to confirm that you are the website owner - meta tag verification or verification using HTML file.

1. If you choose the first way, you will need to paste meta tag google-site-verification into your home page. This tag looks like this: meta name="google-site-verification" content="some-numbers-and-letters". This piece of HTML code must be added between the and head > tags in order to work properly.

2. If you choose the second way, you will be asked to download a HTML file and upload it to your domain. Then you will need to visit yourdomain.tld/downloaded-file.html in your browser.

No matter which of these ways you choose, when done you need either click the "verify" button to complete the process or "verify later" button for later verification. As soon as you finish this verification process, you will get immediate access to the Google webmaster tools and take advantage of all its features.

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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.

How to Blog Effectively With 7 Awesome Free Blog Tools

During 3 months of learning how to blog, it's inevitable that I have to resort to various blog tools to make the process easier. I will try to make a comprehensive list of these tools in accordance to their function so that you can incorporate all or part of them in your blog management.

1. SEO evaluation tools or software for your website

There are a great number of blogging tools that you can use when you need to evaluate the SEO effectiveness of their website. WooRank is a brand new free service recommended by Techcrunch this morning. It evaluates a website based on 50 criterias, provides helpful SEO tips and most importantly it's free for now. I've used the tool to evaluate some of my websites today, and connectivity seemed to be excellent as opposed to the frequent downtime complain mentioned by Techcrunch.

2. Links Checker

There are a few free blogging tools you could use for checking backlinks. The most commonly used is none other than Google Webmaster Tool. It's the most basic blogging tool. Apart from this, you can use Backlink Watch to check on all the sites that are linked to yours. There are a few advantages in using Backlink Watch:

a. Don't have to past tracking code into your website
b. Shows all the websites and pages that are linking to your own website
c. Comprehensive

It's disadvantage:

a. The tool limits the frequency you can use it in checking backlinks

3. Keywords Analysis

Use Google AdWords Keyword Tool to gauge on the keyword that you wanted to use on your blog title and its content. For example, if you can't decide on which keyword or phrase to use, "blog tools" or "blogging tools". Just type both the phrases into the fill-in-box, then followed by clicking on the 'Get keyword ideas'. From here, you can actually gauge which phrase has a higher search and subsequently, choose the best keyword.

4. Analyse Trends

Google Trend is still the best tool to use when you want to know about the most talked about trend being searched in Google. Google is the big brother of Search Engine. As a result, if a particular fad or trend is rising in popularity in Google, you can rest assured that, this is the trend you need to watch out for in the rest of the blogosphere.

If there is a field that you are particularly interested in, for example, blogging, you could make use of Google Alerts. Google Alerts would send you the latest news and happening of your interest to your email address.

5. Duplicate Contents

You have to be more sensitive with duplicate contents in your blog if you are hiring part time writers for your content. You are paying these writers and as a result, you would expect their articles to be original and not just pure plagiarism. Try CopyScape. This website allows you to check all the possible duplicated contents inside your website. With this report in hand, you can always ask for refunds from your writers.

6. Search Engine Ranking Checker

Thumbshots Ranking could be used to compare SERP ranking in different search engines, for example Google vs Yahoo.

Another exceptional free SERP checker worth mentioning is SERP Rank. Of the two, I found the latter to be more precise in gauging the search engine ranking of our website.

7. Page Rank Checker

For the beginners, we could just use Google Page Rank Checker to check the page rank on any site of your interest. For instance, there might be a site or link that you are interested to exchange link with. Most of the time, we do not want this link to be lower than the page rank of our own, so therefore, we carry out the page rank check.

8. Social Networking

The No. 1 tool that comes into my mind is TweetDeck. This blog tool is an Adobe Air desktop application used to access twitter. It's built in panes that allow an enormous exchange of information tweets. An obvious advantage of TweetDeck as compared to other Tweeter browser is the former's responsive speed and smaller file size.

Another social network tool called twables, which is said to enable you to find all of your Facebook friends on Twitter so that you can follow them, and they can follow you! For this tool, I can't really comment much about it because personally, I haven't really given it a try. Please try it out and give us your comments if you like!

The links to all the blogging tools mentioned are made available in the blog.

I love blogging and I'm going help you make your blog business a success. Please follow me on HowToBlog.org in Blogging Tools

Using Google Webmaster Tools to Find Low Hanging Fruit

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to uncover some "low hanging fruit" for getting a bit more traffic to your website. The First step of course is you have to get a webmaster account in Google and verify your site. You can put the keyword "Google webmaster tool" in the Google search bar and find out how to register for your webmaster account. You can then also follow the instructions to verify your site.

One of the features of the webmaster tool is that it will show you all the major search terms that your site appeared in over a selected time period. In addition to the search terms it will show you the following for each term:

Number of impressions: The number of times someone searched using that search term in Google over the specified time period
Click through rate: How frequently the visitor clicked on your search engine listing
Average position: Your sites average ranking during that time period.

You also can drill down for each term and see specific data for each range of rankings. For most search terms, your site ranking will move up and down, so sometimes it is helpful to see the data for each specific ranking.

I use the average ranking to sort my results. For most sites, you will see that you rank in a lot more search terms than what you optimized for (assuming you did some optimization). What I am specifically looking for is search terms that:

Have not been optimized
Are ranking in the top 20
Have a fair amount of impressions
And are relevant to my business

Yes, these terms are in all probability going to be longer tail search terms, but these can be a gold mine for your business.

I am going to pay particular attention to terms that rank in positions 2-5 and terms that rank near the top of the second page. The reason for this is that these are the areas that get the greatest gain in traffic when you improve search engine ranking. For example if you go from the top of the second page to the bottom of the first, you can expect your click through rate to triple or even quadruple. Granted, in most cases we are talking about long tail search terms that don't have huge volumes. Likewise any movement from the fifth position up will generate significant traffic increases. Going from 5th position to 3rd position will double your traffic, going from 3rd position to 1st position will more than quadruple your click through rate.

The key factor is that these are terms that were not optimized for, so in theory, it may not take much to improve their ranking. By using the Google webmaster tool, you can discover what web page to review. Perhaps all you have to do is modify the title tag, add some content or maybe just create a deep text link. For most long tail search terms, the result should be a slight improvement in rankings. I previously used this method by Google Analytics and manually putting terms in the search bar, but with some of Google Webmaster tools newer features, the process is a lot easier.

Example: For an ecommerce site, we discovered that the site was currently ranking #12 in a long tail search term. There were about 24 visits a month to the site for that search term. By some very rudimentary optimization of the webpage we got the term to rank #9. The monthly traffic increased to over 120 visits, and resulted in one additional order per month at average sales of $350.00. We generated about $4000.00 dollars of additional revenue per year. Thanks to Google Webmaster Tools this method becomes very easy.

Stephen Petersen is a WSI Internet Consultant that has specialized in search engine optimization for over 5 years and is the owner of SP Business Solutions. SP Business Solutions also does custom websites for businesses.

How To Earn Money Using Google AdWords - Tools And Tips

Do you want to know how to earn money using Google AdWords? Learning to effectively use Google AdWords can exponentially increase your profit margin online. Here are some effective methods that will help your business and profits quickly grow.

A) The Money Making Process

With each new Internet user comes a new potential prospect to advertise your services or products to. Never in the history of advertising has there been such an effective marketing tool as Google AdWords. Why is this? Two words. Instant Advertising.

With Google AdWords it is quite simple to setup your ad campaign. All that remains after you have a product or service to advertise is signing up for an AdWords account. Only a few clicks later, and bang...millions of potential prospects will instantly see your ad.

B) How To Make A Buck Or Two

When learning how to earn money using Google AdWords, it's important to realize the need to drive highly targeted traffic to your site. AdWords is a perfect advertising tool for this.

What methods should you employ when composing a Google ad?

The headline must grab the attention of your prospect


The remaining ad lines must quickly describe product benefits and create a call to action


The url (domain) name should be related to your business or product

If you can make these 3 things work together, then you'll have a good ad. Over time, you'll learn to adjust certain words to create a higher click through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of people who click on your ad when they search for the keyword or keywords that your ad is optimized for.

As your CTR continues to increase, Google will allow you to pay less for your ads.

Before you write your ad you must think as a consumer, NOT a seller. Ask yourself these questions:

What keywords will my prospects be using to search for my product?


How much will they be willing to pay?


What kinds of benefits are they looking for in a product?

Answering these questions before you write your ads is very important. This will allow you to predict the mindset of your buyer which can save you lots of time and money.

C) The Ultimate Objective

When mastering the art of how to earn money using Google AdWords it's important not to lose sight of the two most basic elements:

Write a good ad that people will click on
Make sure your landing page both excites the prospect to buy and matches the ad you have written.

Most Google AdWords newbies forget to make sure that their sales page matches the ad that precedes it. What does this mean? Basically, make an effort to see that the page you direct people to naturally corresponds with the ad description buyers will click on. Don't write an ad about improving your golf swing and then send them to a sales page for discount golf clubs.

Ultimately your online success will come down to you marketing your product or opportunity effectively. Driving targeted traffic to your site is the key to success.

About The Author:

Justin Michael is a top mentor in the home business industry and devotes his time and energy to helping others generate a 6-figure income working from home.

For information on how you can take control of your financial situation and achieve great wealth online, visit Justin at Perfect Wealth Formula or you may reach him at:
Email: seahawkmarketing@gmail.com

Basic SEO Optimization Techniques - Google Webmaster Tools

This article has been written to help people who may be new to internet marketing get their website noticed by the search engines. There is much more that can be done, but for the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to deal with only one topic in this article - the use of Google Webmaster Tools.

Note: Google Webmaster Tools is able to be utilized on many of the website building sites, so although these notes are particularly aimed at WordPress, you can still use them to help get the SEO going on your other sites. You will generally be able to find all this sort of information under a 'Settings' tab when you are in edit mode on your website.

You can get your sites verified by pasting the meta tag code from the Google Webmasters Tools site into the appropriate box when you are in edit mode for your site on the website building site.

Back on the Google Webmasters Tools site, you can also often get your site sitemapped by typing in 'sitemap.xml' in the box next to your site's address, after you have clicked on the 'Add Sitemap' button.

Go to the website at Google.com/webmasters/tools/

If you have a little look around here, you will see how Google views your website. This site can give you valuable information about the traffic coming to your site and how you can increase it by analyzing your View Links Data, Top Queries and Page Analysis.

The important thing about this site is that by submitting your sitemap directly to them, they will be sure not to miss any of your posts or pages.

So, sign up for your account (a good idea is to use the same log-in information for this account and your AdSense account [if you don't have an AdSense account yet, just keep it in mind, because you probably will open one at some later stage and you can use the same account details for it]. Ditto for AdWords.

When you log in you will see your Dashboard. Add your site address with the www. but not the http.

Click 'Add Site'

You will then need to verify your site, so choose the 'Add a Meta Tag' option. Below you will see a code, which you need to copy and paste into your site's header. Open a new window and go into your WordPress Admin area. Go to 'Appearance' then 'Theme Editor' then select the Header from the list on the right-hand side. When it comes up, scroll down to where you see the script and paste your meta tag code in just ABOVE this script and BEFORE the script.

Click 'Update File'

Go back to your Webmaster Tools window and click on the 'Verify' button. If you have done everything correctly, you should get a message confirming verification.

Now, go back to your Webmaster Tools Dashboard and next to your site URL there will be a column titled 'Sitemap' - click on the link that says 'Add'. Choose 'Add General Web Sitemap' and put in sitemap.xml where required. Click on 'Add General Web Sitemap'

You need to get some good content onto your site, if you haven't already done so, before you move on to more SEO strategies. If you created your site on one of the website building sites, once you have put some content on your site and you have published it, you can use other search engine optimization strategies, also.

Valerie

If you are keen to get on with job, you will find lots more information on search engine optimization basics for both WordPress and other sites at Valerie's blog, Voiceover. You will find it at http://voiceover.valerieeldridge.com.

Valerie Eldridge has been an administrator and manager of both offline and online businesses for many years. These days, I like to help people who are new to internet marketing, and maybe struggling and confused, find a clear path.

Come and meet her here, http://www.valerieeldridge.com

Google SEO and Webmaster Tools

Google SEO refers to the process of altering a website in order to get better results in search engines. It is basically optimizing the website in such a way that more traffic is created from all over, leading to more sales for the webmaster. Google is considered the most searched search engine beating its competitors by far. Its popularity can be seen from the fact that almost 90% of searches over the internet are done through Google due to its simple design.

The first stop for any one who is looking to get their site known over the internet is Google webmaster tools. It is free and Google does not charge anything for it. This is basically the one stop shop for webmasters in order to get detailed reports about their visibility on Google. The Google SEO webmaster tool basically alerts you if there is a possible error on the webpage and also tells if the pages are indexed. It also gives you details information on search terms and allows you to submit a site map.

This webmaster tool basically helps to increase the visibility of your site in Google search results. It provides detailed reports regarding your pages visibility on Google and sees how your site is performing in the search results. The Google webmaster tool helps you to build a Google friendly site and troubleshoots potential problems. This tool is useful for anyone with a website be it blogger, any IT company be it small or big and government websites as well.

Google SEO webmaster tool helps you to know which pages on your site drives traffic to the most links and which keyword searches drive the most traffic. With it one will be able to see the site as Google sees it, if Google has any problem regarding accessing any of the pages on the website, it will inform the client. You can build a Google friendly site by accessing Google Tools and following easy to follow instructions. The other important feature is that it has many tools including robots.txt analyzer tool which make sure one is not accidentally blocking Googlebot from crawling your website. It also has a dedicated help center which provides guidelines on creating the best site possible. Google webmaster tools is a great addition to your SEO arsenal and if used correctly will enhance many aspects of your campaign, enabling you to draw in vast amounts of traffic to your site.

If you would like to learn more about Google seo Please visit SEO Wizz

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

Signup for the WebSiteSecrets101 newsletter, and learn the tricks webmasters use on their sites.

Using Google's Webmaster Tools to Help Your Backlinking and Ranking

When you're trying to rank your website to get organic search traffic, backlinking is the key. In short, the more back links you get, the higher you will go in the SERPs. Now of course this is a relative thing, but it's important to understand why.

Trying to rank against strong "authority sites" that have high Pagerank and thousands of backlinks can be an exercise in futility. But generally speaking, the more links, the better your site will do. But all back links aren't created equally. Links from strong sites, those with a high Page rank, are worth more to your site than those with lower rank. It's actually the passing of this "link juice" that gives your target site it's boost. This means you want higher value links.

Just as important however, perhaps even more pertinently is whether or not Google sees and counts your links. Though they may index nearly every page, not every link they come across counts towards your SERP ranking. How do you know which is which? That's where Google's Webmaster Tools comes into play.

Webmaster Tools was designed to show the webmaster where their links are coming from. As such, you can see which of the backlinks you are taking the time to get are being seen AND counted by Google. If it isn't in Webmaster Tools, it isn't doing your site any good, at least as far as boosting your ranking is concerned. Another great use for Google's Webmaster Tools is for you to see which links you might be able to take more advantage of. When you see that your links are sticking for instance from your blogs, Squidoo lenses, other sites, etc., you immediately know they are more valuable links. So why not go back and re-visit those web sites? You might just be able to post more links, or put in links to your other sites.

I spend a lot of time in Webmaster Tools. I look to see where my backlinking efforts are paying off, focus further efforts where they count, and reduce the time I put into those that aren't paying me dividends. Plus I comb through the results always looking for new and better sites to go back to with more links. It's also worth noting that Webmaster Tools will show you the specific pages where you are linking to. You should make sure to vary your links, vary your anchor text, and don't just link to your home page, but your inner pages as well.

Make Google Webmaster Tools a routine part of your own "site intelligence". You'll find you can spend your time in a more valuable manner, and that you avoid going through the process of building, checking, waiting, checking some more, all for something that won't help you in the long fun anyway.

The author is working on more mundane topics including Miele Vacuums On Sale and Baby Potty Training for some homemaking publications.

Webmaster Tools From Google: Signing Up to Improve Web Visibility

Any webmaster wishing to get more hits on their sites and attract more web traffic needs to have webmaster tools in their arsenal to be successful. A lot of companies these days lack the knowledge in making their sites more suitable for search engines, so they end up having little traffic, and more importantly, less sales.

As a webmaster who manages a site, it is important that you have efficient webmaster tools to help you do the job of maintaining and making sure that the website is indexed by search engine spiders to ensure visibility and high ranking in search engine results. This is where Google can be handy, as it provides tools that you can use as a webmaster to track how much traffic you actually generate to your site. If you haven't signed up for this service yet, here's how you can do it:

Go to the Google webmaster home page and register. If you already have an email address with Google for example, then you just have to sign in with it and your password. Upon signing in, you will be directed to the landing page or the dashboard wherein you can find options for your tools as a webmaster.

Once on the landing page, you will immediately see a link that will allow you to add your site to the search engine's web directory. Once on the right page, prompt will appear directing you to add the URL of the website you wish to add and use your webmaster tools with. Keep in mind that Google will only allow changes if the person accessing the account is the website owner. It may also ask to make small changes to your site as proof that you have complete ownership of it.

Once registration is complete, you will again be directed to the dash board where Google will provide you with statistical data about site traffic, number of back links, and a few other useful information that you can use to improve your site.

Once you have access to your webmaster tools, you have the option to submit a site map to Google for them to update the number of pages found in your site whenever necessary. This allows for search engine spiders to efficiently crawl through the data found in your site and produce better ranking in search results.

The above-mentioned steps can also be applicable to several other search engines that offer various tools for webmasters although with slightly varied steps that are involved in registration and adding your websites.

Google also provides other services that you as a webmaster can use to further improve your site's visibility. It is important however is that you use this to your advantage and make the necessary changes based on the data you are receiving. If you are getting less traffic from your back linking methods for example, you may want to add to your link base and determine which of the links work and which do not. Google's webmaster tools can be a great asset to you and to your site, especially if you know how to make use of the important data provided.

Search Engine Optimization delivers targeted traffic with high conversion rates. SEO your site now.

Website Optimization With Google Webmaster Tools

One of the more valuable tools available to webmasters today is Google Webmaster Tools. This free set of tools offered by Google, provides webmasters with all the tools they need to optimize their website for search engines, report errors encountered on your site, and help in marketing their website.

How to Get Started

The first thing you will need to get started is an account with Google. If you have a Gmail account then you already have an account. Otherwise, you can just sign up for a Google Account on their website. With your new account in place, you can log in to the Webmaster Tools site and start to configure a website to track.

Before Google can show you tracking information, you need to verify ownership of the site. There is a wizard on the Webmaster Tools site that walks you through the process of verifying ownership. Among several different verification methods, one simple way is to download a simple HTML file and then upload this to the root directory for your website. This will have a unique file name that looks something like google07ed25be517f5f23.html. Use an FTP client such as FileZilla to upload this small file to your server and your verification is complete. It may take as long as 24 hours before you see tracking information show up in Webmaster Tools.

Search Queries

This page contains a list of actual search queries run on the Google search engine where your site appeared in the results. This important report will tell you how many times your result was displayed for the query (impressions) as well as how many times users clicked on your result (click throughs).

This is really the holy grail of organic search engine marketing. Having unique and good quality content on your site will attract lots of visitors and backlinks. The more backlinks you get to your page, the higher your page will rank. And when your page ranks higher, it appears nearer the top of the search results for the relevant terms contained on your web page.

Links to Your Site Page

This report shows you all of the backlinks to your website. These are the backlinks to your site according to Google. Every search engine uses a different algorithm to determine how many backlinks to your site exist. Google is famous for rejecting a large amount of backlinks if they feel that the links were paid for or traded just for the purpose of improving page rank.

Keywords

The keywords report really gives a webmaster keen insight into the way that Google views your website. It will tell you which keywords predominate all of the content pages on your website. Additionally, you can view a detailed report which tells you which content pages have the strongest ranking for each keyword. For each page, you will see how many times the keyword occurs on each page.

Internal Links

The Internal Links gives you a summary of how pages are linked internally. Internal links are links from one page to another within the same website. Google uses these types of links to determine the relative importance of pages within a site. These type of links cannot be used to improve the page rank of a webpage, just to indicate how important the webmaster values them relative to other pages.

Malware

Occasionally, a website gets hacked by nefarious individuals. It is your responsibility as a webmaster to make sure that hackers are stopped, or at the very least, any malware placed on your site is removed quickly. The Malware report will display a list of pages with possible malware. You should check this report regularly to make sure your site is clean.

Crawl Errors

The Crawl Errors report displays errors that the Google spider encountered while attempting to read web pages on your site. This page is important for identifying errors on your site. Sometimes, the errors on this page will be as simple as a timeout issue meaning the page took too long to load. If you see any Server Errors

Crawl Stats

The Crawl Statistics report gives you some useful graphs showing you how often the Google spider visited your site. For popular sites, the spider will visit every day. Google has a very powerful search spider that doesn't have problems visiting hundreds of millions of sites each day. You can incorporate a sitemap into your site to indicate to the Google spider how content on your site should be indexed.

HTML Suggestions

The HTML Suggestions report contains a list of issues that could affect your search engine rankings. Webmasters should heed this report well, because all of the information here is specifically tailored to help your site rank better. This will not only help your search engine ranking with Google, but with all other search engines as well.

It provides information such as "Duplicate meta description" and "Short Meta Description". Webmasters should also make use of the W3C Validation Service which will check your HTML and CSS for any non-standard markup or errors which may cause problems with search engines. Search spiders like clean and standardized markup which is well-formed.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are XML files that contain the URLs of all content on a website that should be crawled and indexed by a search engine. Not only do they list all of the possible URLs, but they also include information such as when the file was last modified, how often you expect the web page to be changed and a priority that indicates the importance of the page within the entire site.

Webmaster Tools will tell you how many of the URLs from the Sitemap have been submitted and also how many have been included in the index (Google search engine). If there are any errors with the site map, these will be displayed as well.

Crawler Access

Using the crawler access function, you can view and test your robots.txt file (which excludes certain content from search engines). There is also a tool to generate a new robots.txt file using user-defined exclusion rules. Another important tool is the Remove URL feature which allows a webmaster to request that a page be forcibly removed from the Google search engine.

Sitelinks

If your site is deemed worthy enough, Google will generate site links underneath the normal search result. These are links to sub-areas within your site that are very popular with users. Because these links are automatically generated, you cannot define your own site links, but you can request that site links be removed if the algorithm Google uses erroneously chooses sub-areas you don't wish to be displayed to users in the search results.

Conclusion

When using Google Webmaster Tools, make sure to read the help documentation carefully. It will provide you with a lot more detailed information on how to optimize your website for both the search engines and your visitors. There is a wealth of information that is crucial to your understanding of running a website and more importantly, promoting your business.

Ken is the founder of Orvado Technologies, a San Diego Web Design company building custom web apps using search engine optimization and intuitive user interfaces.

Using Google Webmaster Tools to Help Make Your Small Business Better

When it comes to giving your small business an upgrade, you need to develop an Internet presence. Even if you're part of a small, localised community, you have to see how important the Internet can be to your small business. Nowadays, people are less likely to walk into a store without knowing something about it first. In the old days, you would have to explore and see for yourself first-hand. Now, people use the Internet to learn even about the small businesses in their own community. This is why your web page can be so powerful for your small business. If you have a small business that sells all over the country or world from your website, then you know how important the Internet can be. In this article, you will learn about using Google webmaster tools to help make your small business better.

If you're unfamiliar with what Google webmaster tools do, basically they allow the webmaster of your site to see how Google views your site. In other words, your webmaster can see how your site is indexed, how many hits and visits it gets, and what kind of search strings bring your site up. Using the webmaster tools, you can get a view of your website that can certainly help to optimize performance. You can see which marketing techniques have been working and which techniques probably need to be reconsidered.

Using Google webmaster tools, you can upgrade your business's website in a meaningful way. Instead of adding new graphics, videos, or content for the sake of an upgrade, you can actually make informed decisions. This may be a matter of knowing which links bring viewers to your site, or it may also be a matter of finding out where your viewers are coming from. In today's world, you could have potential customers virtually anywhere. They could be right next-door, or they could be in another country on the other side of the world. You have to figure out where they are and what you can do to turn them into loyal customers.

The best way to look at Google webmaster tools is to see it as an accessory in your search for the perfect website. It's a tool, just as the product advertises itself. Keep in mind that it is a free tool, and that you can use it when you'd like. Watch how your business grows and use webmaster tools to steer it in the right direction.

To receive a free website analysis from a professional internet marketing service or to learn more about SEO visit http://ukinternetmarketingservice.co.uk/our-suite-of-marketing-tools/on-page-seo/

Why You Should Register Your Site With Google Webmaster Tools

I've have more websites than the average person: 15 at the last count. It seems that whenever I have a new idea for internet marketing, I create a new website. You'd think that means I'm making tons of money, but unfortunately that hasn't happened yet.

When I first started doing this, I would diligently register my website with Google Webmaster Tools. This is a free tool that Google has. It shows you stats such as the last time your website was crawled and if there are any crawl errors (this is important to know).

But then I started getting lazy. This step got omitted more and more. I decided it didn't really matter.

But now I've changed my mind and I think it's important.

The main reason for this change of heart came about when I created one particular new website. Google crawled my site pretty quickly and my home page was indexed within days.

But weeks went by without the other content pages showing up. When I typed in site: and my site in Google, it showed that only the home page, privacy policy, and contact us pages were there.

I patiently waited for Google to find the rest of my pages. I had a site map, both for the visitor and an xml version for bots. But after a few more weeks-nothing.

So finally I registered the site with the Google webmaster tool. And I discovered something very interesting.

Google was, in fact, crawling my site on a regular basis. But my site was generating crawl errors!

The crawl errors page of the tool led me to discover a problem in my htaccess file. It turns out I was accidentally hiding all of my pages from the Google bot except for the home page, privacy, and contact us.

I had copied the htaccess from another site that needed the code in it. But for my new website, it had an adverse effect.

So after that experience, I'll always register my website with the webmaster tool.

Now I'm not sure that registering the site map makes a difference as far as getting indexed goes.

On another new website, I noticed only one page on one of my new websites got indexed. So I made sure I registered the site map with the webmaster tool, hoping that would help Google find the rest of my pages.

But a few days later, it didn't seem to make a difference. The additional pages still were not indexed.

Regardless, the tool is still very valuable. For instance, you can find out when Google last crawled your site, how many pages are indexed, and if there are any crawl errors.

It also tells you some basic analytics information such as which are the top keywords that were used to find your site, and also a list of external sites that link to yours.

As far as which pages are indexed, that's an area that the tool is lacking, in my opinion. It tells you how many pages are indexed, but not which ones.

But overall, the webmaster tool gives you some very helpful analytics. More importantly, it alerts you quickly to crawl errors that may be preventing your site from being indexed.

Louis Banalty has quite a few websites that are registered with Google's webmaster tool. He also has a website with wood pellets for sale and information on pellet stove pellets.

How to Make a Website - Useful Tools

When developing a website there is a lot to consider even if you are experienced and already understand a lot of the requirements and concepts involved. It makes it easier if you know what tools are available to help you out. Based on this I have compiled a list of the tools I find most useful when developing a site and thought I would share it with you.

Browser Extensions

Firebug and the Firefox developer toolbar

These are two different extensions for Firefox which allow you to both inspect the data and scripts that make a website page up. Firebug is actually my favourite but you may wish to check out the Developer toolbar as well. Do a search on google for 'firebug' or 'firefox developer toolbar'.

Developer toolbar for Internet Explorer

There is also now a developer toolbar for Internet Explorer 7 and IE 8 actually comes with the toolbar pre-installed.

These tools allow you to do things such as: inspect CSS styles sheets and Javascripts used in the page, see the individual CSS or Javascript events attached to individual HTML elements in the page, view header data, post and response data. Believe me, whether you are a web designer or web developer, learning how these tools work will give you a big advantage when developing and bug-fixing your websites. I absolutely cannot do without them on a day-to-day basis.

SEO for Firefox

There is a great little tool if you want to understand SEO. Search Google for 'SEO for Firefox' and you will find seobook.com which offers 2 tools for SEO - a toolbar and also an inpage set of SEO results.

SEOMOZ keyword extractor

This tool scans a web page and reports back the keywords and terms which are most prominent on that page. Basically, you tell it where your website is, then it tells you which terms your site seems to be trying to rank highly in search engines for. If the results aren't the keywords you've been targeting, you'll probably want to make some changes.

Browsershots

Browsershots is a great service for web designers that lets you see how your website looks in different types and versions of web browser. It can take a while to produce the results, but it has a comprehensive list of browsers and you can't argue with the price - its free.

Wave

It's good practice to adhere to to accessibility guidelines, and means people with disabilities will find your website easier to use. Wave is a tool to evaluate how accessible your site is - it will show you what you're doing right, and where you can improve.

W3C link checker

It's easy to get links right when you first add them to your website. But as your site grows, pages change. The same happens to external sites too, so links which once worked often end up at a 'page not found' error. This link checker scans every link on your web pages, telling you which ones work, which ones don't - and exactly what's wrong with them.

Site Monitoring with

Site24×7 - this free online service pings your site hourly and graphs response times and warns you if the site goes off line. For a few dollars a month, you can get checks every 5m and SMS alerts.

Wordpress

Wordpress is probably 1 of the greatest tools to be introduced to the web in the last few years. It was originally intended as a blogging tool but now - with the great range of Theme templates, widgets and plugins you can create a fully fledged website without having to write any code yourself. You dont have to create blog posts but can just create a site which has pages. Plugins such as SEO for Wordpress even help optimize your content for SEO without you having to understand this too heavily.

Google Tools

Google Webmaster Tools

Your best insight into how Google's search engine sees your site, statistics of the googlebot's activity on your site. You can even adjust the crawl rate of the googlebot on your site ie. this is useful if the googlebot is taking up alot of bandwidth and throttling your site.

Google Analytics

Completely awesome, interactive, online site statistics.

Google AdSense

Sign up for AdSense and you can make money by putting Google provided ads on your site. Google generate the code for you so you don't even have to write any yourself.

Technorati

If you haven't done it yet, registering your site with Technorati will help you track your interactions with the blogosphere. Who links to you and how much authority your site has. Warning: addictive!

Alexa

Yes, I know it's the subject of much debate but if you get reasonable amounts of traffic, Alexa is one useful way of benchmarking your traffic against other popular sites. It's also a useful way of seeing who is linking to your site.

Feedburner

Feedburner provides site statistics, simplifies RSS feeds, does some social network bookmarking (Digg etc.) and some other stuff. There's a WordPress plug in that automatically switches existing RSS subscribers over to a Feedburner feed.

If you are completely new to the topic of how to make a website then you might find it useful to check out our article 'Starting Web Development' first.

Jon Jackson
http://www.springwebdevelopment.com/

Tools That Every Website Owner Should Be Using Right Now

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.

Top 5 Most Valuable Google Marketing Tools

Google has become the most dominant search engine that almost every webmaster or web owners devote all their attention to with the ultimate aim to get their website to rank on the #1 page in an organic search. Seems a tough task but did you know Google offers help along the way?

Yes, help in sense of their FREE marketing tools available at your disposal but more often than not is looked over or ignored by many since it's been offered free! These useful marketing tools can make your website or blog promotions easier and more profitable. Lets snap up this marketing tools now as I run through the top 5 most valuable marketing tools Google has to offer.

1. Google Analytics

Perhaps the premier marketing tool offered, Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your website. Google Analytics analyzes your traffic, where it comes from and how it interacts with your site. This vital information allows you to create targeted ROI driven marketing campaigns which in-turn can increase your site's conversion rate.

2. Google Sitemaps

A Sitemap is a list of pages on your website. Google Sitemaps lets you furnish Google additional information of your web pages and URL's that might not be discovered by Google's normal crawling process. Information such as how often pages on your site changes, last modified date of each pages and relative importance of each pages on your site are very useful information to Google that can help them crawl your site better.

3. Google Alerts

Get email notifications on topics or stories that you are monitoring with Google Alerts. It also helps you in keeping current on a competitor or industry.

4. Google Groups

As social networking fast becoming an important aspect of website or blog promotion, Google Groups offers the platform. You can manage your contact lists efficiently to make your marketing activity easy and precise!

5. Google Docs

Google Docs is a full featured online writing editor which allows you to create and share your work online. Your files are stored securely online so you can edit your work anytime and from anywhere. It also lets your publish your content directly to your blog.

9 Free Webmaster Tools You Can Fall In Love With

Webmasters and developers don't need a whole lot of money to spend on tools in order to work efficiently and be productive. Here is a list of free tools that help me run my everyday webmaster chores.

Notepad++

Dreamweaver and such designing tools might have become very advanced in the recent years but I am still far from satisfied with them. I prefer to do the coding with a simple text editor and be in total control of the code and not end up with unnecessarily long code. Recently I discovered Notepad++ which has the few bells and whistles that are desired by hard core programmers such as code highlighting, Regular Expression Search/Replace support, capability to extend functionality with plugins and nice depository of contributed ones. Worth your attention.

Filezilla

If you are like me and don't use WYSIWYG editors to do your HTML/CSS designs then you are probably need or are already using a standalone FTP client to upload/download files to and from your server. Filezilla is a free tool that I have been using for some time and has not failed me. New version 3 has lots of new features, if you are FTPing stuff often maybe you should check it out.

Xampp

XAMPP is an apache server distribution that integrates php, mysql, phpmyadmin and a bunch of other great open source projects into an easy installation. It can be used on production servers to host one's sites but I mostly use it locally to code and test my html/css/php projects. Its easier to develop locally because there is no need to upload files on servers everytime, and only upload when your project is complete. It can be installed on Windows/Linux and lots of other platforms and if you are serious about developing you should get it installed in your computer and start playing with it.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a free website statistics package that anyone can easily integrate into their website in a few minutes. Analytics once installed on your website it gathers data and presents you with reports about which sites your visitors come from, what country they live in, how long they stayed on your site, which pages were more popular and a whole lot of reports that you will likely not need another statistics package for you site. Those statistics are vital to the progress of any site in order to understand a site's audience and find things that might need to be improved. You can create as many analytics accounts as you like (unlimited number of sites) as long as your total pageviews don't exceed the monthly allowance of 5 million.

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is not only a great browser to surf with. Firefox was build with extensibility in mind and has given developers a way to extent its functionality with add-ons. Add-ons can enhance the capabilities of Firefox and enhance the browsing experience. There is a whole lot of add-ons in the Mozilla repository that can help you with task such as bookmarking, searching, social interaction, developing, news reading, downloading to name just a few categories. Some of the following favorite tools of mine are actually Mozilla Add-ons. Its definitely worth your attention.

SeoQuake

Seoquake is a Mozilla add-on that was created with the SEO professionals in mind. It will help you gather important statistics about a website or web page with the touch of a button. Such statistics include PageRank, indexed pages, Google backlinks, Cached date etc. One can also extend it/configure it to gather other important statistics from online services not already included in it.

Firebug

Firebug is yet another Mozilla Add-on; a webmaster tool that can help you understand and debug your javascripts. It has so many bells and whistles that I am thinking of devoting a whole article on it. I will just mention the features that I use myself; Inspecting and editing HTML and CSS on the fly, debugging and running javascript on the fly, monitor network activity but there are many others. Here is a video tutorial I recently found that will help you get started with firebug debugging

Gimp

Gimp is an open source image manipulation package that can help you with photo retouching, image composition, format conversion and animations among other things. Its not likely to replace adobe photoshop any time soon but its a free alternative that has found many followers and through its plugin architecture promises to built the only image manipulation tool you will ever need. Some of its features are presented in a way of a presentation but nothing can convince you better than to actually install it and try it on your own.

The Google Suite of Webmaster Tools

When I first started promoting websites almost nine years ago (2001), there was a lot more guesswork that had to be done by webmasters to figure out what Google expected for a website to rank favorably in search results. Google has evolved over the years, continually increasing interaction with its webmaster audience and giving progressively clearer instructions on how to rank well for targeted search terms. Google has also become more open in seeking feedback from the webmaster community and its search audience in general. In addition increasing the dialog between Google and its users, Google has created a suite of products that are very useful for accomplishing tasks that cover the full spectrum of website promotion, including getting your site indexed by Google, tracking traffic to your site from all sources, promoting products, and optimizing your content to achieve higher traffic and higher conversions.

Setting up a Google Account
To access the Google tools, you'll need to set up a Google Account. There are a few different ways to set up an account with Google, including signing up directly to access any of Google's webmaster tools described below. To set up a general Google account, all you need is an email address. Although you could manage your access to the various Google tools using different accounts, it makes sense to keep everything together under one account.

If you don't have any form of an existing account (such as Gmail, Picasa, iGoogle) with Google, you can go to their Accounts page and set one up. You simply enter your email address and a password to get started. After you've submitted your account information to Google, they will send you a verification email with a link that you need to follow to verify that you own the email address you used to set up the account.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows webmasters to monitor traffic patterns on their websites. Setting up your website with Analytics is normally very simple. You sign up for an Analytics account, insert a tracking code into your website header, and watch the stats start rolling in.

Google Webmasters
Google Webmasters serves a few purposes. It is a community for webmasters to learn what Google expects from their websites in order for them to receive high search rankings. It's also a way for webmasters and Google to communicate regarding their relationship. Webmasters can submit sitemaps to Google to help with indexing their sites. They can also configure settings to give Google recommendations on how to index their sites. Google provides through their Webmasters tool helpful information regarding links it recognizes pointing to a webmasters website. The Webmasters tool also provides information about keyword searches for which the webmaster's site ranks highly and clickthrough stats related to those high ranking keyword terms.

Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps provides a way for webmasters to help Google index their sites correctly. You may have noticed when doing searches on Google that there are some results that show up on the results page, but when you click on the link to visit the site, the page doesn't have the same information as was presented in the search results. Sometimes the page is gone altogether. Why does this happen? Because Google has the ominous task of trying to index billions of web pages, keeping their contents as fresh as possible. Obviously they're not perfect. They need help from website owners.
Sitemaps is Google's way of asking for help indexing your site, which in turn helps your site. In the control panel for Sitemaps, Google suggests that submitting a map of your website will "...tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover." Sitemaps has been integrated with the Webmasters setup, so you can submit your site's map by logging in to your Webmasters account.

Google Base
Google Base is a handy tool for websites that sell products. Webmasters can create product feeds representing what they have available in their online store, and submit those feeds to Google Base. Google displays the products to people who use its product search module, and oftentimes products listed in Google Base are included with regular web searches. Using Google Base is just one more way store owners can get their products in front of potential customers.

Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer is an analytical tool that webmasters can use to determine the best way of presenting content to their visitors. Using Website Optimizer, a webmaster can run experiments to see which version of a page is more successful at accomplishing a goal such as generating a lead , a sale, or some other action.

Conclusion
Google's tools have made it increasingly easier for website owners and webmasters to understand what is required of their websites in order to achieve success along the most dominant search engine. Understanding and using these tools will certainly benefit your SEO and overall website promotion goals.

10 Most Valuable Free Google Marketing Tools

Google has become the dominant search engine on the Internet.
It would be hard to imagine a web without Google. For that
matter, it would now be hard to imagine a world without Google.
As frightening as that may seem to many people, it is none the
less true.

For better or worst, Google has permeated into almost every aspect
of our everyday life. Being Googled is now a common expression and
an act carried out by millions of users around the world each day.
New Google products and services are coming on stream at a frightening
pace, further increasing Google's impact on our lives.

Despite this dominating presence, many people still don't realize
Google offers some excellent free marketing tools for marketers
and webmasters. Marketing tools which can prove extremely valuable
to any webmaster or marketer trying to promote their sites or
products online. Useful tools that will make your promotions
easier and much more profitable.

Don't be fooled by the 'free' label, these marketing tools
might be free but there are also valuable. One even wonders
why Google would be giving away these tools and services for
free? It probably makes good business sense in the long
run, by providing these free tools Google is fostering a
lot of company good-will and building up the Google brand
name in the process. Good PR is good business.

Every marketer and webmaster should be taking advantage of
Google's good-will and snapping up these professionally run
services and marketing tools. Here's a quick run-down of
the 10 most valuable free Google Internet marketing tools:

1. Google Analytics

Perhaps the premier marketing tool offered by Google.
It will prove helpful to both the marketer and the webmaster.
Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your web site. Google
Analytics analyzes your traffic, where it comes from and what it does
once it enters your site. You can monitor up to three sites
for free.

Google Analytics is extremely valuable in analyzing your
marketing funnel, it tracks all the steps leading up to your
sales or checkout page. Vital information for raising
your conversion rate and ROI.

You may be placed on a waiting list for this highly in
demand service from Google.

LINK http://www.google.com/analytics/

2. Google Sitemaps

Webmasters can use Google Sitemaps to almost instantly place
newly created pages on their site into the Google Search Index.
This is an XML file that is uploaded to Google as new pages
are added on your site. Needless to say this can be a valuable
service for any webmaster or marketer who wants to get their
information on the web quickly.

LINK https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

3. Google Alerts

Be notified when someone or another site lists your site
or mentions your name. Great way to keep track of all your
online activities. Great way to monitor all your online
business interests and products.

LINK http://www.google.com/alerts

4. Google Froogle

Froogle is Google's price directory! It simply lists all
the cheapest prices for different products on the web.
For marketers and webmasters who are promoting products,
it should be studied and analyzed. Optimizing your
site's content for Froogle may prove to be very beneficial.

Follow Froogle or Google directions exactly on how to
list or display products on your site. Froogle will
spider your site and display your prices and products
to thousands of targeted customers. That, as they say,
is priceless.

LINK http://froogle.google.com/

5. Google Checkout

Not exactly free but for those marketers who use AdWords
--- for every $1 spent on AdWords you can process $10 for free.
You can also place the shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad
and take advantage of the prestige and trust the Google
brand name has built up.

Over time marketers may find this tool to be very
effective and valuable.

LINK https://checkout.google.com/

6. Google eBlogger

Blogging has become vitally important to the health and
functioning of your web site. No site should be without
at least one blog and RSS feed. Creating a blog (online journal)
on the topic of your web site or product will bring in extra traffic
and targeted customers. eBlogger is a simple free
blogging service that even lets you publish or post your blog
files to your own web site server. Keep in mind, each blog
has that all important Google Blog Search bar.

LINK http://www.blogger.com/

7. Google Toolbar - Enterprise Version

Try the new enterprise version of the Google Toolbar
for your company or business. Integrates countless
features with all your employees or corporate
network. These could include a common customer
database, company calendar, financial news...

Keep in mind, Google also ranks every page it indexes on
a scale of 0-10. While it is important to know the Page Rank of
your own pages, it is even more important to know the PR of
your competitor's pages. You can use the toolbar to get
the PR of each page you're visiting. Extremely helpful
information for webmasters and marketers to know when
forming online linking or business arrangements.

LINK http://toolbar.google.com/T4/enterprise/

8. Google Groups

Every marketer knows the important of having a large
contact list of people with a similar interest. Social
networking will play an ever increasing role in your
success on the web. Just look at the growing popularity
of sites like MySpace and LiveJournal.

Google groups is another form of social and business
networking that every marketer should be aware of and
pursuing.

LINK http://groups.google.com/

9. Google Adsense

One simple way to monetize your web content is to
use Google Adsense. Just place the Adsense code
on your site and receive a check from Google each
month. For webmasters who are not really into
online marketing (does such creatures exist?) Adsense
can be a painless way to earn extra income from
your site.

For professional marketers using the Adsense system can
supply a tremendous amount of marketing information on the
keywords in their particular niche. It keeps the
marketer informed on what keywords are being bid
on and how much advertisers are willing to pay.

Adsense also has an excellent real-time tracking
system you can use to keep track of all your
important web pages.

LINK https://www.google.com/adsense/

10. Google Writely

A recent addition to Google's stable of free products.
Writely is a full featured online writing editor with
spellcheck and great collaborating features. It also
lets you publish your content directly to your blogs.
One feature that may be of interest to marketers, it lets
your save files in the popular download format of PDF.

Lets face it, until video takes over the web in four
or five years time --- the written word is still king on the
net. It is the medium that markets, promotes and sells
your content or products. Writely will help you write better.

LINK http://www.writely.com

Honorable Mention - Google Trends

This Google program will let you search popular trends,
important for marketers searching for the latest hot
product to promote. You can also break down these trends
by different regions.

LINK http://www.google.com/trends

Final Note

Please take note that signing up for a Google account will
usually help you in obtaining most of these free services or
programs. Some of these programs may have to be applied for
individually. But be assured, all these free Google marketing
tools are well worth your time and effort. They will make your
marketing easier and they will help any webmaster or marketer
run their online business more efficiently.