Hopefully you are getting the idea that Search Engine Optimization is a process. Anyone telling you otherwise, does not know the business. Google provides wonderful tools that can help web administrators improve the business. Which makes the "web guy" or in my case "webman" very important to the success of your marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most web designers are hired for their creative side and people who hire them often overlook the individual's business skills.
Webmaster Tools
After you've implemented Google Analytics, you need to implement Google's Webmaster Tools. This tool along with analytics will be the basis to improve your website search results. So what's in the tool? Let me start with the dashboard.
Dashboard
The dashboard is designed to give you an overview of your website statistics from Googles viewpoint. Since Google is the most widely used search engine, it's probably a good idea to at least get an idea of what they think of your site. Within the Dashboard are Top search queries, Crawl errors, Links to your site, and Sitemaps.
Top Search Queries
So just what are the top search queries? Google defines it as "queries that have returned information about your site". In reading the page, the # represents the position of the query on your site. This may be somewhat confusing. It does not indicate the likelihood of being high in the rankings on google. For instance, if I select the first hit on vacationtours.com, "funjet + vacation", I don't get a web hit for my site until 650 hits in. However the second on the list, I'm top of the google search. So top search queries are not how people find your site, but keywords in your site how people might find your site.
Crawl Errors
These are generated when google goes through your site and finds problems traversing your website. For example, a 404 error will report as not found. These should be cleaned up. You need to have an efficient site for Google to crawl through. Also users may hit the same problem.
Links to your site
This is where you can see who is linking to your site. Similar to running link:vacationtours.com in a google search. Except in here you can download it and sort it based on a comma separated list.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are important to tell google how to crawl your site. It may help or it may not help your rankings. So if someone tells you absolutely need one for better search engine optimization, watch out. The crawlers usually follow links in your site. If the links are clear, then there is not much need for a sitemap. However, if you have alot of forms and hard to follow links, then it is a good idea to have them. I'll demonstrate a sitemap in a later post.
Now that you've got your Google Analytics going and Google Webmaster tools in place, it is time to start reviewing the data.
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