Your Website needs Webmaster Tools!!

One of the first few questions that all new website owners ask is how can they get their Website to the top of Google’s search results. And as anyone in the industry will tell you, unfortunately it is a long process with no real guarantees.

That said there are a number of cool tools out there to assist matters and my favourite one this week is Google’s Webmaster Tools. The toolbox is filled with a number of very valuable little features, with two that are particularly top of mind.

Firstly, the Crawl Rate Indicator. Yes we are all paranoid that the King of search might not be getting to our site often enough and we desperately need to know when they last popped in. Well the crawl rate reveals all: crawl frequency, number of pages crawled and the volume of data crawled. Very nice!

The second feature of interest is the Site Map tool. It’s a fairly simple process to set-up and once configured allows you to communicate to the Googlebot (Yes is seems they might actually be listening) the relative importance of each page on your site and the frequency with which each page is updated. These little bits of data are then used to guide the Googlebot back from time to time.

All very interesting stuff and worth taking a look at.