Head Resist

Web design, Programming, Development and SEO

Search Engine Optimization Tips – Google Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

Friday, January 28th, 2011

In today’s age, users do not have the time or the patience to go through thousands of search results. More than 90% of Internet users do not browse beyond the top 15 sites. In such a scenario, visibility and search engine optimization are crucial if you want to pull in maximum visitor traffic to your site. In such a case, Google’s Webmaster tools help you do just that and much more!

Google provides one of the best Webmaster tools available online. These tools offer a free and an easy way to make your site more Google-friendly and search engine optimized. “Google Webmaster tools” have great scope to help you in efficiently handling all aspects of website management and making your site search engine friendly. To take an example, keyword suggestion tool helps you in identifying keywords relevant to your business. Another tool like site analytics software helps you track online visitors to your site. This tool can provide information about the channel through which these visitors find you, if they are turning into customers and also give data on prospective leads on your site.

Broadly, these tools provide updated information about any problems on your web pages; the number of pages contained in your index and a detailed compilation of every page on the Internet that links to your pages. Using this tool, you can identify the reason why your pages rank high or low for search words and phrases. Optimal use of Webmaster tools is the only way you can achieve



search engine optimization

and a sure shot technique to stay way ahead of competition.

Another valuable tool is Sitemaps. A Sitemap is a list of pages on your website. By creating and submitting a Sitemap, you provide Google information about your site, including URLs which Google’s normal crawling process may not be able to discover. The Sitemap tells Google about the important pages of your website and how often you change them. This tool helps Google crawl your pages smarter and enables you to see what is going on the minds of Google searchers. To take an example, you can see what queries and keywords people use when they find your site. You will know whether people find you for the keywords you have been targeting or not. This way you can optimize your content.

Google Sitemaps is a simple way in which you can enhance your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that allows you to communicate directly with Google. The Sitemaps protocol allows a web master to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. By submitting sitemaps to a search engine, a web master is assisting that engine’s crawlers to crawl more intelligently and do a better job. Having a Google Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have latest and up-to-date information. To build your sitemap online in four easy steps, check the link http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.

Google Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps are an excellent way to take better control of your website management. You would no longer be passively submitting your site; but would also monitor and edit it. As explained earlier, with the help of these advanced tools, you can improve online traffic to your site, enhance your site’s functionality and grow your business opportunities.

Search Engine Optimization Rules – Three Rules To Help You Top The Search Engine Rankings

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Search engine optimization is probably the most important aspect of website development.  No matter how much you pay for a fantastic looking site, you can still have no visitors for it if you do not address the basic requirements of search engines.  You can, of course, get visitors by paying to advertise on other websites, but this is an ongoing cost and as soon as you stop paying, the visitors stop coming.

There are many different aspects to search engine optimization, but the following three rules will get you off to a good start and save you a lot of time and money.

Rule 1 – Get it right from the start

If you create a website first and then try to deal with search engine optimization, you will face an uphill struggle.  This happens to lots of people because they often have not even heard of SEO until after they have built a site and found that no-one is visiting it.  The most important thing you can do when developing a new site is to build in your SEO right from the start.

To succeed online, your website should be designed right from the start with search engines in mind.  This will govern the whole structure of your site, the names and keywords you use for pages, the file names and alt text you select for images, the subjects you choose to cover on your site and even the whole theme of your website.  Putting these things right afterwards is sometimes impossible, particularly if your site is not small.

There is one option open to you if you find that you have a site which you are happy with, apart from the fact that you have no visitors.  In this situation it can be best to set up a new well optimized site which attracts lots of visitors and funnels them direct to your old site to deal with sales, etc.

Rule 2 – Learn From Your Competition

When you know what key phrases are most important for your website, check out which other sites are in the top ten positions for these phrases now.  You need to analyse these sites carefully, because whatever they are doing is what you need to be doing too.

A good SEO tool will help you analyse your competing websites quickly and easily, covering all the different aspects of your competitors, such as who is linking to them, what keywords they use on each page, keyword density, etc.  A large part of why the other sites are at the top of the search engine results pages will be the sites who have added links to them.  You need to be able to quickly assess all of these links and pick out the ones that are doing the most good in terms of adding Pagerank, and target those to get links for your own site.

Rule 3 – Automate as Much As You Can

The problem with SEO is that so much of it is a time consuming business.  There are lots of separate jobs that each require careful research and then many repeated actions on your part.  I am thinking of keyword research and analysis, submission to directories, seeking link exchange partners, article submission, etc.

If you were to do all of these things manually, it would take you forever just to deal with one website.  The only way to make SEO tasks practical is to automate as many of them as you can, using shortcuts wherever possible.  This is what SEO tools are designed to do.  You can get specialist packages and services to deal with link building, or directory submission, but a good SEO software package will deal with all of these together, making your SEO efforts much easier to manage and co-ordinate.