Savvy Affiliate

Day 41 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Google has a ton of tools available to help webmasters improve their site.  They have tools to diagnose problems, find out who is linking to you, analyze you robots.txt file, and much more.  The best part is, all the tools are completely free.

To access Google webmaster tools, go here.  You can login with your Google account, and add your sites to be analyzed.   If you have more than one site, you can add as many as you want.  If you want separate tracking for different subdomains, that is not a problem.

Site Diagnostics

One of the best parts of Google webmaster tools are the site diagnostics.  Running a blog, I miss some of the error checking features that you might get from a good piece of web development software like Dreamweaver.  Luckily, Google has them all in one place.    

If you login to webmaster tools and access your site, go to Diagnostics, you will find this

Quickly glancing at my page I can see there are some problems with it.  I have several http errors, some broken links, and some pages which Google can not access because of my robots.txt file.  I can drill down to those errors to learn more about them.

My Links Not found errors:

The links not found is one of the best features available.  Occasionally I will forget the http:// in front of a link I am adding in my blog.  When you do that it becomes a relative link instead of an absolute link.   These are all links that are broken in my blog.  Now that Google identified them, it is relatively easy to go in and correct them.

I can also look at my http: errors

These errors are a little more troublesome.   I have 64 pages which Google apparently can not access. They are all “403 Forbidden”  meaning that they aren’t being indexed by Google, and they aren’t driving any traffic to my site.   Although I don’t know the cause of the error, now that I know an error exists I will be able to track it down and root it out.   Do any of you know why I might get a 403 Forbidden error on my site?   I presume there may be a bug in my .htaccess file, but it needs more investigation.

 Finally, is there a problem with my Robots.txt file?  Google thinks there might be

Googlebot can’t access 62 pages on my site because of the robots.txt file.   Looking at the pages I can see that it is not a problem.   All of the blocked pages end in /trackback/ or /feed/ or something similar.  They are all auxiliary pages on my site, and they were intentionally blocked from Google by the robots.txt file in order to avoid duplicate content.

The bottom line is that Google webmaster tools can be a great boon to you.   You should use them.  Tomorrow I’ll go into something more fun, tracking who is linking to you.  And trust me, this tools makes much more data available to you than a simple Link:www.yoursite.com would.

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Day 40 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One easy way you can improve the quality and number of posts you write is to create an idea list.   Although I’m sure there are a wide variety of tools available to help you manage a list of post ideas, my personal favorite is Google Docs and SpreadSheets.   Google docs, or any other tool like it, allows you to keep track of your great ideas and manage them easily.

Why have an idea list?

You never know when you are going to get a good idea.  Most of the time when I get a great idea for a post, I don’t have time to work on it then.  However if I don’t do something about it right away, chances are I’ll forget my idea.   The best compromise is to simply write down my idea, and come back to it when I have time.

Keeping your list online instead of on your local machine is a good idea as well.    By keeping your list online you can access it anywhere at anytime.  If you are at your office or on a trip there is a good chance you will have access to the web.  So store the data there and make life easy for yourself.

What to do with it?

The best part about keeping an idea list online is the ability to flesh out your ideas as you go.  If you have a really great idea, but you don’t have time to work on it, you can jot down a little outline.  Later on you might have some things to add or take away.   By the time you really do have a chance to site down and work on your killer idea it is already half written.  You could have most of what you are going to say already in your computer for free.  You will just need to flesh it out, which is much easier than coming up with the idea at the time.

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Day 39 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Blogging means you are constantly searching the internet for new ideas, things you may have seen and forgotten, or just random stuff.   There are a ton of Google search operators which can make your life easier, how many do you use?

• OR or | - use capital OR or the symbol | to put a boolean or in your search.  Maybe you are looking for something that is in Seattle OR Portland.
• - Use the minus sign “-” to exclude certain text from your search
• FileType: looking for a pdf file or a powerpoint you remember seeing?   Use FileType:PDF or FileType:PPT or many others to keep from bringing up just plain html pages
• ..   Use a Number..Number to search for pages which contain any number in that range.  For example if you want to look up Midway Island relating to WWII you could try - Midway Island 1940..1945
• Allintitle: The words must appear in the title of the page
• AllinText: The words must appear in the text of the page
• AllinURL: The words must appear in the Web address
• AllinAnchor: The words must appear in the anchor text of links to the page
• Site: Only return from a particular page.  i.e. - Adsense Tips Site:www.savvyaffiliate.com - This is a great alternative to the poor search functions many sites employ
• -Site: Use the minus sign in front of site to keep from pulling up a specific page
• Related: Look for pages similar to a specific site.   See if anyone out there is using your ideas.
• Link: see who links to a specific site.   Example Link:www.savvvyaffiliate.com to see who links to my page.   Note, Google’s version of links is different than MSN or Yahoo.  Where you might see a couple hundred on Yahoo, or a thousand on MSN, you will see only a few on Google.
• *** -view  use this with a Site: command to see which of your pages appear as supplemental results.  Example “Site:www.SavvyAffiliate.com *** -view”   Ideally you don’t want any as supplemental results, you want them all appearing on the main search page.

Did I miss any?  Let me know and I’ll add them to the list and give you a backlink.

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