Google Wemaster Goodies - October 22nd, 2006
For any body not familiar with some of Google’s webmaster tools this would be a good place to start if you are trying to learn information about your site. I have been working in SEO for the past 6 years and find it’s not peoples ignorance to Search engines its just a lot of people do not understand how search engines work.
Lets think about a Yellow pages, now simply a Yellow pages orders its results alphabetically nice and simple you open the book and everything is there from A-Z. From a marketing perspective many companies started naming their business with the letter A, so that if you needed a plumber their listing would be the first available.
So in a search if you typed in plumber it would bring up a list of plumbers alphabetically. This is the basis of a simple Search engine, these days there are hundreds of factors that contribute to becoming in the top results for a given search phrase. So being aware of underlying factors can help to understand the SEO world.
Now Google the current leading Search engine for the UK, has introduced various tools to help trouble shoot your site. By creating a webmaster account you can find out about the rate you site is spidered, if any URL’s are not reached, what Google reads in your robots.txt file among a lot of other useful tools.
They generally update the Webmaster tools every 5-6 weeks the latest update have been illustrated fully in Matt Cutts blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-webmaster-console-goodness/. To see how it works set yourself up a Google account and log in to “Webmaster tools”.
Neil Walker
Technical Director
Head of Search Engine Optimisation.
