Google Webmaster Tools
Fundamental to getting your site ranked/ranking well on Google, you need to ensure that your site conforms to good web practices and is as ‘Google friendly’ as possible.
Without getting into a lot of ‘technobabble’ some of the basic essentials are:
- your web site should be well structured with a good hierarchy and internal links between pages
- the behind the scenes elements such as page title, description, image tags are all in sync with the subject of the page
- web content should be unique on every page
- including a site map
This is where Google Webmaster Tools can help with detailed guidelines on what are – and are not – good practices when preparing a website. It is also a place to do a health check on your site once it has launched. You need to have a Google ID and have your site validated but it can be linked to your Analytics account. You can see a list of any errors found when the site is crawled by search engines, how often the site is crawled and some basic information about links to your site, keywords used to find the site but this is much less detailed than the information collected in Google Analytics.
There are also links to provide various technical checks – how your website appears in different browsers, how fast your pages load (a slow site with definitely deter users), how Google indexes your site, there may be important content that the search engine ‘spiders’ are not able to access.
If all of this sounds a little daunting then we can help you perform a quality check on your site especially if it is not performing as you think it should in Google searches.
