Google Webmaster Tools Part 3
Day 43 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide
In my previous posts on Google webmaster tools I have covered How to diagnose problems with your site, and how to find out who is linking to you. This post will cover several other tools available to you in Google’s Toolbox.
Check Your Page Rank
Although there are many tools available to let you look at the page rank of a specific page, I think that the one available on Google is very good at letting you take a macro look at your entire page. It gives a break down of how many of your pages are ranking high, medium, low, and how many haven’t been ranked at all.
Currently all the pages on Savvy Affiliate are ranking low. Given that this is a new site it isn’t entirely surprising. It is nice to see that most of the pages have been indexed and assigned a page rank though. Additionally it is handy to see the page with the highest page rank. I’m surprised it isn’t my main site, but that will sure to correct itself with time.
Site maps
You can access your sitemaps in Google webmaster tools. If you have a sitemap for your page, use the webmaster tools to point Google at it. This will ensure that Google indexes all of your pages, and does so fairly quickly after they are first posted. Google checks the sitemap on a daily basis, which is more frequently than many new sites would be checked on their own.
Search Queries
Finally you can use Google webmaster tools to see how most searchers are finding your site, and where you rank for that query.
Unfortunately Savvy Affiliate isn’t currently ranking well for any really desirable keywords. Most of the search traffic I am receiving is from my long tail search terms. However this give me some direction of keywords I might want to target in the future. Am I getting some hits for “Monetize Your Persona?” and I rank number 4 for the topic? Perhaps I should do a post on the subject and try to move up to number 1.
on July 8th, 2007 at 2:24 am
I don’t know if it is my computer or my browser or what, but in Firefox the first graphic covers part of the right sidebar. Also does the same thing in Safari on Apple. Thought I’d give ya a heads up. Very good information though.
on July 8th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Thanks for the information. I had noticed that myself. I just upgraded my theme and found that on this theme, the content dominates the sidebars where it overlaps. Except on IE7, the content gets shifted down. I would like it so that where there is an overlap the sidebar goes on top of the content, but haven’t figured out what I need to edit to do that yet.
on July 10th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I really got a lot of value out of this series. I need to put some more time into Google Webmaster. Ranking for some “desirable” keywords would be nice too.
on July 10th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I really got started on it when another webmaster recommended it fro solving some a problem he had suddenly dropping in the Google rankings. It has been handy for me so far, especially for cleaning up bugs in my page