If you haven’t heard of Google Webmasters Tools and you want to know just whatinformation Google has about your site, you need to create an account. If you’rethinking of creating a site on the internet and need some search engineoptimization statistics after you’ve submitted your site to the search engines,get Google Webmasters Tools. Besides getting invaluable information because theycrawled your site, you get suggestions on improving your site in areas of searchengine optimization from the most popular search engine on the planet! Once youcreate your account, by going to the Google Webmaster Tool Login Page you haveaccess to:1) Overview – this section gives you access to your top search queries. Now youcan see where you place on Google’s Search Engine according to the keywords usedby everyone at Google. You can use this information to improve on your keywords orkey phrases within the different areas of your site.2) Home page crawl – the date that Google last crawled your home page and theircrawl stats. Besides getting Googlebot activity for the past 90 days, you also seea bar graph of your page ranking and your page containing the highest ranking fromGoogle.3) Index Stats – gives you results bases on your:a. Site – pages that are indexed from your site,b. Link – pages that link to your home page,c. Cache – the current cache of your site,d. Info – information Google has about your site,e. Related – any pages that are similar to your site.This information is truly one of the most important areas of your account. If youhappen to have a page that is or isn’t supposed to be indexed, it would show uphere. Viewing backlinks will let you know if those reciprocal link partners areactually submitting their pages to the search engines. Google also has informationabout other sites that have linked to you and gives you information about internallinks that are candidates for appearing in their search results. If Google haspages that are similar to yours, you can check out your competition and see whereyou stand in the results, compared to related pages.4) The Sitemap Section Let’s talk about this section of Google Webmaster Tools. There are severaldifferent types of Sitemaps that you can have on your site. It really depends onthe type of site that you have as to the type of Sitemap or Sitemaps you willneed. Most individuals have an HTML Sitemap for their visitors, but Google prefersa Sitemap that’s in an XML format. Thanks to the Sitemap Generator located athttp://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ it is very easy to create one. All you have to do istype in the main URL for your site and the generator does the rest. You haveseveral types you can choose from and save the generated information to your site,then have Google upload the information from your account.5) Generate a Robots.txt Google Webmaster Tools also has an area for generating a Robots.txt file. Besidesusing Meta Tags, the Robots.txt file is another way of telling the search engineswhich directories and web pages you want indexed and which ones not to index. 6) URL Removal Ever wondered how to get a site or web page removed from the Google Search Engine
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