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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Using Google AdWords For Internet Marketing Website Traffic

Are you looking for a way to bring in targeted website traffic? If so, then one excellent option is Google AdWords. This program is used by many people involved in internet marketing and is a great way that you can begin to drive the targeted traffic to your site that you need. Not sure what Google AdWords is and how it works? If not, keep reading for a closer look at the program and how it actually works to drive more traffic to your site.

Basically Google AdWords is a type of pay per click option that is offered by Google today. You pick out particular keywords that are relevant to your site and create ads with them. However, while some advertising campaigns can cost a lot of money without being effective, when you use this AdWords program by Google, you'll only have to pay when people click on your ads and end up at your page. This means that it is a very cost effective way to bring in new website traffic to your site.

When you decide to use Google Adwords for internet marketing purposes, creating the ad is extremely important. If you use the wrong wording, your ads probably won't work at all for you. It's important that you take a look at the competition for your ads as well; making sure that your ad gives a great first impression while being compelling as well. Choosing the right keywords is also imperative to a great ad.

Once you have a great ad, then you'll need to work on a good landing page as well if you really want to do something with the website traffic that your ads bring in. Otherwise you will have wasted your money if people don't like the landing page and merely click away before you get the time to collect their information. Having a landing page that is effective can actually effect how successful your ads are, so make sure you have a great landing site in place that will steer new visitors towards the goal of presenting them with the information you have for them as soon as you can.

After you have your ads written and you start using them, take some time to test your ads. This can be very important in internet marketing if you want to drive the most traffic to your website. See which ads may be getting the most clicks and use tools to see which ads and which keywords get the best response. This will allow you to target your ads in a way that will help you to increase your website traffic exponentially.

To your internet marketing success!

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Bob Hamilton is an entrepreneur, author, writer, business consultant and trainer. www.OpeningADollarStore.com

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!

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Getting Google to Index Your Website

When you first build a website, it can take anything from several days to weeks and months for search engines to include its pages in their indexes. Certain engines, such as Yahoo!, offer a premium service for sites to appear more quickly, whereas Google has no paid version for site inclusion.

Google's crawler is a process known as GoogleBot, which follows links on sites to discover new content and understand the connection of any given page to the rest of the Internet. GoogleBot then updates Google's indexes accordingly, and once the spider has visited your site, there's nothing you need to do to keep it coming back. GoogleBot will decide based upon your site's size, links and frequency of changing content how often to revisit to check for updates.

Contrary to common belief, there's actually no way to submit your site to Google. Even though they offer a "Submit URL" form, there's no evidence that it causes GoogleBot to view your webpages or has an impact on their crawling whatsoever. But although site submission is not possible, the simplest way to get Google to notice you is to have an inbound link from another site already in Google's index. This works because GoogleBot follows links it discovers, so if you can develop inbound links to your site, it will follow the trail and read your pages.

Another useful tool once you are indexed is Google Webmaster Tools, which allows you to register any site you administer, and provides statistics about how GoogleBot views your site. This can help uncover common problems, such as broken links, missing pages, malware and other issues that can cause your pages to lose rankings in the search engines.

James Beswick is the author of "Ranking #1: 50 Essential Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results" available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1452849900?ie=UTF8&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&qid=1279571154&sr=1-1&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393177&tag=ekcy-20.

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How to Use Google AdWords to Drive Hordes of Visitors to Your Website

Traffic is the main component of an internet marketing campaign. Without traffic, you won't earn sales and you just don't have a business. However with traffic, you can earn money and your business may just be able to survive online.

Free internet marketing techniques work really well to get you traffic to your site. Some of the top ways to get traffic to your website for free is article marketing, forum marketing, video marketing, SEO, and using classified ads. But all of these techniques take time to work and if you need traffic to your website right now, then you probably should use advertising.

Everyone knows that it takes money to make money, and when advertising online, you can leverage the use of 1 particular website to do just that for you. Google AdWords is a pay-per-click marketing site that can drive a ton of traffic to your website for just a small investment. When you invest money into Google AdWords, you can get to the top of the search engine rankings for just a small fee.

Google AdWords is very popular in the internet marketing world do to the fact that it can get you results fast. It allows you to test and track your campaigns and analyze your conversion rates all within a simple dashboard. Here's how advertising on Google AdWords work.

You create an ad and set a bid price to pay when someone clicks on your ad. The minimum you can bid is $0.05 cents and if you can get customers at this bid price than you should. Your niche will probably be competitive however so you will more than likely spend more than just $0.05.

After you create your ad, you select a few keywords that you want to bid on and you set your bid price accordingly. After you've finished setting up your ads and keywords, everything is all done. Your ad will soon show up in the paid search results on Google's search engine listings.

When you use Google AdWords, you're paying for laser targeted traffic to your website. You can pinpoint the exact kind of customer that you're looking for all through the use of keywords, and with a lot of keywords you increase the chance of getting a ton of visitors to your website.

To get the most from Google AdWords, you will want to do a few things. The first thing that you will want to do is do proper keyword research. Google actually has a free keyword tool that you can use to find out what people are searching for. You can find that keyword tool here:

https://AdWords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

When you use this tool, you can type in a keyword that is related to the product that you are selling and find tons of variations of it. You will want to use this when doing your keyword research.

You will also want to write a good ad. Google measures how good your ad is based on your click through rate (CTR). You click through rate measures the percentage of users that click on your ad versus the amount of searches that your keywords yield. The higher your click through rate the better. So to get a high click through rate, you will want to write the best ad as possible so that your ad can get shown more often and so that your site can get more visitors.

With any advertising medium, you will want to test and track your results. Google has something called "Google Analytics" that you will want to use to test and track your campaigns. Testing and track is an essential part of any internet marketing campaign and advertising on Google AdWords is no different. Good luck with advertising on Google AdWords and increasing your sales and profits.

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Getting More Website Traffic - How to Use Google AdWords Image Ads to Get More Visitors to Your Site

When it comes to getting more visitors to your site and making more money online you are going to have to make sure you focus on what is working. That is why I want to show you right now how you cause use Google AdWords image ads to get more visitors to your site and make more money from those ads.

Step #1 - You have to make sure you understand how they work!

When it comes to using image ads, you are basically using banner ads on the Google Content Network to get more visitors to your site. What happens is you load up your banners and they go out to all the sites on the Content Network that are related to your niche market.

Step #2 - You have to make sure you start using them right away.

You have to realize that very few marketers use image advertising right now as they don't know that it works! You have to make sure you get in and start using this source right away so you can take advantage of it before it gets over saturated with other marketers trying to do the same things as you. If you can get in and start figuring out how to use this source in your niche market now, you can master image advertising and then you will be able to block out a lot of the new competitors who try and come behind you and use this source.

So make sure you start using it right away so you can take full advantage of this source in your niche market.

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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.

Is My Website Automatically Indexed on Google?

So you've finally got your website up, its all designed and you're waiting for the Google crawler to come along. Its now two weeks later and your site isn't indexed? You ask yourself is my website automatically indexed in Google?

There are several ways to help get your site indexed in Google.

The first option is to firstly use a 'pinging' service. What this does is to let the search engines know that your site exist and to visit it next time it goes crawling (although this can never be guaranteed).

Another option is to create an XML sitemap. If you do not know how to do this, there are many free tools online to help you create one. A sitemap file is usually stored in the root folder of your homepage and can be named whatever you like, however most people just leave it as sitemap.xml. The next step for a sitemap file is to submit it using a Google Webmaster Tools. You will also be able to monitor if your pages have been crawled and indexed.

Social bookmarking is another way to get your site crawled and indexed quickly. The most popular sites are updated every few minutes with fresh content and search engine spiders absolutely love them so it is definitely worth bookmarking your pages.

Article directories such as Ezine Articles similarly to the point mentioned above are crawled every few minutes as it has very good credibility and authority. It is always worth submitting as many quality articles as you possibly can with a link back to your site to try and get it automatically indexed.

RSS feeds are an additional feature you can implement. If you do not know how to do this, then just like a XML sitemap, there are plenty of tools to help you do this, IceRocket have a great RSS builder which is free. Once you create an inventory of your pages, you can submit this to several directories.

If after all the above methods have been implemented, you may want to look at your robots.txt file as this may be blocking the spiders from crawling your site or you may have other issues. Rest assured, there are many people that claim that they can get a site indexed in hours, however it can take weeks so one needs to be patient.

So in essence, if you have a brand new website that has no backlinks, no sitemap and nobody knows about your site, then it will be very unlikely that your site will automatically be indexed in Google. The best way is to get backlinks so these links can be followed and then eventually to your site. Most of the methods above try to cover this point. Good luck.

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My First Website - Using Google Services

Every webmaster is using at least one of many Google services. This is because Google is the most important web search engine and like it or nor you can not do anything on the web without taking Google into account. Google search engine is popular because it returns highly relevant search results. It is not so easy to select relevant pages among millions of websites where spam is present on every step. Consequently this also means that it is not so easy to create pages that will appear on the top of search results. This is a very important fact for internet marketers which depend on traffic. And one of the most important sources of free traffic is Google search engine.

Google provides many services, most of them are free. It is up to you which of them you will use, however, some of them are almost indispensable.

Google web search

This is the basic service that you can use to search for anything, to make money or just to have fun. Using Google is not an option, it is a must. There is simply no alternative. Yahoo and Bing try to compete with Google but they are still light years away.

Google Webmasters Tools

This service shows what Google search engine knows about your websites. Here you can add sitemaps, check for broken urls, page loading times, used keywords, links and much more. To use this tool you need to verify ownership of the website you would like to check and then you can see how it performs in the eyes of crawlers and search engine.

Google Analytics

This tool is used to monitor visitors, their properties, source and other stuff related to the performance of the website. Here you can also monitor the number of daily visitors, where they come from, how long they stay on the page, what they are searching for, etc.

Google AdSense

This service can be used to make money with any website. You simply put few lines of code on the page, This code will show Google ads and whenever somebody clicks on them you will be paid. Usually you will get few cents for each click but in some cases you may get even few dollars for one single slick.

Google AdWords

With this service you can advertise your website. You can choose to display ads with search results or on user pages where the ads will appear as AdSense ads. Of course, this service is not free. You have to pay when users click on your ads. It can be anything from few cents to few ten dollars in highly competing market niches.

For example, the Free quark website uses many Google services. Here you can find everything about domains, free hosting, commercial hosting and many useful webmaster advices.

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.

Making Your Website Work - Using Google Webmaster Tools

Any website designer or webmaster has certainly logged on to Google and used their great webmaster tools including Google Analytics and much more. We are big fans of these free tools and encourage you to log on, visit and succeed with them.

In order to use any of these tools, you will need to create your own user account. This is a painless process and you can link many accounts together.

Part of the process includes learning about site verification codes, tracking analytics javascript code and much more. It is relatively simple for an experienced website designer to embed these codes into any website and they offer heaps of free advice. You should consider the steps to follow when building your website so you include the proper tracking codes on each page correctly because if you make any errors or omissions, your website analytics may not reflect accurate metrics. You can also add tracking codes for Yahoo and Bing but this is covered on another link for you. Don't forget to review the "IP filtering function" so you are not getting credit for your own visits to your website while working on it.

Another great tool for webmasters is one of our all time favorites... Google Docs! You can set up your website sitemap plan including detailed content planning, post it online and then share it with all stakeholders on the project including your client. This collaberative method of communication makes everything much easier and can help you avoid some of the common road blocks normally experienced with any project management challenge. Another great tool to use is Google Images. There are literally millions of great graphics and images you can use freely on your website or blog (most all are in lower website resolution) but make sure you double check for any copyright limitations before posting to your website or blog.

Here are some of the most common subjects you should consider when planning the design of your website product.

CREATE AN ACCOUNT
Do you already have a Google user account or do you know how to go about creating one? Do you know how to LINK accounts?

ADD YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE
Do you know how to add your site to the Google indexing services? Do you know how site verification works and how to go about making it work?

WEBMASTER GUIDELINES
Have you reviewed the Google Webmaster Guidelines to ensure that your website does not get penalized by them?

SITEMAPS
Do you know how to create a sitemap, why you should do so and how to ensure you have done everything correctly?

GOOGLE DIAGNOSTICS
Do you know how to use the website diagnostics and exactly how this can help you to improve your page ranking?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Do you know how to use the website analytics and how to use these metrics to improve your website and your visitors' experience?

 

5 Ways That Google Webmaster Tools Can Help Your Website

If you are a webmaster, managing one or more websites, then Google Webmaster Tools could be very useful to you. It enables you to monitor the performance of your website and its visibility to search engines.

1. Firstly, Google Webmaster Tools enables you to submit an XML sitemap of your website. A sitemap is a list of pages on your website. These pages are displayed in a hierarchy, showing the route leading to each page on the site. The site map is available to search engine robots and tells them about pages which they may not have otherwise found. Google Webmaster Tools shows how many of the pages on your site have been indexed.

2. Google's robot (Googlebot) crawls web pages and indexes those pages which it thinks will be of interest for future search engine results. Googlebot logs any pages it cannot crawl or links which it comes across which are broken. This information can be accessed through the Webmaster Tools dashboard, enabling you to fix any issues and fulfill your website's potential.

3. Another facility which is useful is the ability to see which searched keywords led to your site being listed in Google's search results and how many users clicked through to your site. From this information you can assess which are the most popular pages on your site so you can focus on those pages and the products or services which they relate to. By seeing the click through rate of your listing in the search results you can also see how appealing your listing is to users.

4. Maximise your sites' optimisation by deciding which URL you want search engines to direct traffic to. For example, either htt p://www.yourdomainname.com or yourdomainname.com, this can be set on Google Webmaster Tools.

5. An important aspect of website optimisation is obtaining both external and internal links to your site. Google Webmaster Tools lists details of these links which is downloadable. Details include which websites are pointing to yours and which pages they are pointing at.

If you want to drive more traffic to your site then Google Webmaster Tools provides the information which will make a difference.

My First Website - Using Sitemaps

When you create a new website it will be indexed as soon as the crawlers encounter a link to it. In general, you don't have to submit any information to search engines because the web is based on links. If there is a page then there must be also some links that point to this page. Otherwise the page is probably not worth indexing. However, there are situations where crawlers can not discover all the pages you have. This is where you can help them with sitemaps.

Sitemap is an XML file with defined structure. It contains information about all the pages of the website. All major search engines provide a way to submit sitemap files. Google, for example, uses Webmasters Tools as a place where you can submit sitemaps.

The main purpose of the sitemap is to inform search engines and crawlers about all the pages you have. Using this information bots, spiders and crawlers can visit pages even if there is no link pointing to them. But there is also another more important function. By submitting a sitemap file you can track how many pages are indexed by the search engine. This information is very important because in the case you find out that not all pages are indexed you may have a problem. In many cases pages with little or no content will not be indexed. This is normal. Less "normal" is when some article page is not indexed. In some cases you have to wait for a while, while in other cases the reason may be duplicate content or any other reason that makes search engine to think that this page is not worth indexing.

You can also add images, videos, code and geo information to the sitemap file. This way you can inform Google, Yahoo and Bing with all the stuff you think is worth indexing. More information about this possibility can be found at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Creating a sitemap file is pretty easy. All popular content management systems including Wordpress and Joomla have an extension which can automatically create a sitemap file from all the pages of the website. This way you don't have to worry about the file structure and links. There is also a possibility for websites that have no such automatic solution. There are many scripts that can crawl the site by following internal links. Using this information they create the file which can be submitted to search engines.

Getting More Website Traffic - 3 Ways You Can Easily Use Google AdWords to Grow Your Online Business

If you want to make a lot of money in your niche market you are going to have to make sure you are using Google AdWords to make it happen. They are still one of the largest sites on the internet and they can give you a lot of traffic if you know how to use them the right way. In this article I want to show you exactly how to use this source to grow your business.

The First Way - To Promote A Product That You Already Have...

If you already have a product that you are using to make money online then you need to make sure you are using Google AdWords to get visitors to that offer. The bottom line is that you need to make sure it is working to make a profit on the other sources you are using first! Then once it has proven it self, start using it on AdWords.

The Second Way - To Qualify A New Niche Market...

If you are trying to figure out which is the best market to go into, you are going to want to make sure you put up a test site and see if you can get visitors to that site using Google AdWords.

If you can get the visitors to your site for a good per click price & you can get the volume that you are looking for, that is a good indication that the market will work for you.

The Third Way - To Promote Other People's Products...

One of the fastest ways to get up and running online is to start promoting other people's products using this traffic source. You have to make sure you are focused on working in one niche market and mastering that one niche.

Once you have gotten good at promoting other people's products you can start adding in your own products and make even more money.

Make sure you start testing out these strategies right away so you can make more money with this source in your niche market.

How to Get Targeted Website Traffic Using Google AdWords

The goal of every internet marketer is, of course, to make a profit. The most common methods of anyone online making a profit is usually through selling something, either information, or a literal product. Profit will normally happen if traffic (people visiting the website) can be directed to it. However, any kind will not do, but it must be targeted website traffic. This simply means it must be of the right kind.

While there are a lot of promises out there about how you should go about getting that traffic, one of the most common, and simple methods is to use Google AdWords. Google is the biggest search engine today.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 83 or more percent of all people use it to do their searches. And strangely, enough, if you are not using Google AdWords, then you probably will not show up in the first 3 or 4 pages of the results. Now, if it were me doing the advertising, which would not make me very happy - because nobody will ever even know my website ever, existed, with those kind of results! Profit just became a dream!

Here are five ways to begin to get that desired targeted website traffic.

Learn About Keywords

If you are a beginner internet marketer, as we all once were at onetime, you need to know about keywords and how to find the right ones for your product, or niche market. Spend some time online learning how they work, and how to write them into your articles or ads that you put into your website. Also, learn the many things about keyword placement that will cause spiders to reject your webpage - that's no fun either.

Set Up Your Website

This will take a little work - if you do it properly. Many marketers only use pre-made websites that look professional and advertise a particular product. This is great, and works, but you usually cannot alter any information on it. If you make your own page, however, be sure to make it professional looking. Your potential customers won't be sticking around long if your "store" looks shabby.

Get An Account With Google AdWords

In order to begin to increase website traffic, you need to get an account with Google AdWords. You can have multiple diversity of ads running with Google AdWords. But remember, it is worth it, because now you're getting the most popular. It will take Google a little time to search out your website and give you an approval to initiate your campaign. But once they do, you want your ads ready to go.

Set Up Your Ads, And Watch Them

Signing up will allow you to put up multiple ad groups. After you get that account, you want to carefully write those ads. Again, take a little time to do your research here, too. It will be worth it. This is what people will see when they do their search on Google. To get an idea about what words to use, do a few searches yourself, and note the wording of the ads that are in the top positions. See what grabs your attention, and makes you want to go to that website.

Along with writing your ads, you will also choose an amount indicating either: how many cents per click you are will to spend; or, a total dollar amount per day, or month. This will determine you budget. Be very careful here - it can run up a bill real quick. Avoid using keywords that brings everybody to your website. Remember that you only want targeted website traffic - a particular crowd who is looking for the very thing you are selling. Some marketers suggest that if you have good keywords, you may not need to go much above 15 cents per click.

Watch Your Ads Results, And Make Changes As Indicated

Finally, watch your ads results to see which one is attracting the most attention. Stay with that idea, and rewrite your other ads in a similar way and change them a few times more, to get the best ad possible. When you have a good ad, and a good page rank with Google, then you will definitely increase website traffic in a way that you want.