Sometimes Google makes changes that are announced and other times they make remarkably silent changes.  In the case of Google Webmaster Tools, both types of changes have occurred – outdated software alerts and PageRank.  The recent changes are a reflection on how the company is constantly striving to keep up with its customers’ needs and desires.

Update alerts

In the case of the former, Google is going to incorporate a service that alerts webmasters of web site software updates and releases when these programs become outdated.  The reasoning behind this new service is that many web site owners are unaware of new updates.  Not applying them in a timely manner can lead to a hacked web site.  In fact, the company started out with merely sending alerts to web site owners of potential security issues and when this was well-received, Google decided to take it a step further.

The alerts are not limited to just software updates.  Google has set it so that web site owners will be notified of new modules or plugins belonging to existing programs (such as new Drupal modules or Joomla extensions).

How is Google managing to identify which web sites and programs need to be targeted?  The company parses the source code of each and every web page it crawls.  Normally, within the source code of these pages one will find software generated meta tags that indicate the program version number.  When a version number is lower than the currently updated program version, an alert is sent out to the web site owner. For the moment, update alerts depend upon software creators ensuring their version numbers are listed within the meta tags.

There has not been a specific time set for this newest feature to be rolled out, though Google indicates it will be soon.

PageRank

The other change that Google has made recently to its Webmaster Tool area is that of PageRank.  The removal of this particular feature was not announced – just silently passed off.  In the past, Google consistently informed web site owners that too much focus was being placed on PageRank when, in reality, it was not considered to be a tremendously valuable metric to follow.

The odd thing is, though PageRank has been removed from the Google Webmaster Tool area, it remains within the Google Toolbar.  Apparently it is considered to be too solid of a piece of the branding for Google to have it removed.

Though removed from the tools and left in the toolbar, Google has indicated the PageRank can still be considered useful.  It can indicate to the user how the web site is behaving within Google’s index.  If “green,” all is well.  If any other color, an investigation is warranted.

Google does wish to point its users to an FAQ page dedicated to Google and SEO – this area covers crawling, ranking, and indexing.  The fact is, PageRank is one of a couple hundred signals that can affect a web site’s ranking.

Whether silently removed or publicly preannounced, it seems Google is keeping up with its customers’ ongoing web site needs.

One of the most important things you can do in ensuring your web site is successful is creating a sound SEO strategy.  Not only will an SEO strategy help you keep on track of things you need to implement for SEO but it will also enable you to properly promote your web site and its content.  Done correctly, you’ll be able to spend more time on your actual web site rather than the implementation of SEO.

To-Do List

There are a few steps in creating your SEO strategy.  The first of these is to create your plan.  An effective way to write your plan is with a to-do list.  This to-do list should map out your tasks and the goals you would like to achieve.  Once you’ve accomplished each task or goal, you simply tick it off. A good example of a plan or to-do list would be to first list your main goals.  Then under each goal, list out the tasks you need to complete in order to complete the intended goal.  You may decide that a primary goal is concerning your web site’s search engine placement.  Another good goal is increasing the traffic to your web site.

With your to-do list created, you can fine tune and add additional tasks for each listed goal. Some good examples would be to research which search engines are the top ones utilized and then finding out how their submission guidelines work.  You could also list researching your keywords and phrases as a task, finding the correct places to incorporate your keywords and phrase and then locating a site or program that will enable you to easily track your website. This last task is another crucial part of a good SEO strategy – how to analyze your site.

Analyze

Analyzing sites and programs abound on the internet but one of the better ones to use (and without cost) is Google Webmaster Tools.  It offers sitemap creation, views of the top keywords used to locate your site and where these words positioned you within Google, backlinks (links that are to your site from other sites) and much more.  Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to makes changes to your SEO strategy based on what appears to work well and what doesn’t.  Keeping up with changes, sitemap resubmissions and eventually garnering more backlinks from web sites are all part of ensuring your site sits high in the rankings and a good analyzing tool will make these tasks easier in the long run.

Monitor

Lastly, the best SEO strategy you can implement is constant monitoring.  Again, you can opt to use Google Webmaster Tools for this particular task or one of many other sites and programs available.  It’s a bit of a “lather, rinse, repeat” kind of attitude that needs to be incorporated into your plan.  Doing all the research, the keyword placement, the backlink requests won’t amount to anything if it is only done once.  It needs to be constantly monitored, constantly changed and this simply is no easy task without a good plan in place.  In choosing your analyzing program or site, you will need to keep this in mind.

Final Word

The success of your SEO strategy is deeply tied in with your entire SEO campaign and, as such, is one of the key items that will ensure the success of your site.  In a nutshell, create a good goal plan in the form of a to-do list, give each goal the tasks needed to complete the goal, analyze your site and efforts and vigilantly monitor your SEO campaign.  You will soon see a marked improvement in your web site statistics.

Google has a terrific set of webmaster tools that cannot only help you analyze your site for SEO purposes, but also make it more efficient and easier to manage.  The majority of these tools can be found in Google Webmaster Tools, an amazing package that contains a variety of very useful features.  This toolkit gives you a lot of power, allowing you to upload your sitemap directly to Google , check to see when the search engine spiders last crawled your site, tell Google how you want the URLs for indexed pages to appear and much more.  Let’s go over some of the key benefits and determine how they can aid in your analysis and optimization efforts.

Learn How the Spiders Work

Perhaps the most essential information Google Webmaster Tools provides you is a comprehensive section that details exactly how the search engine robots view your site and where you rank in terms of keywords.  When a bot crawls and indexes your site, you can see what keywords led to its indexing and what order they are being ranked in.  If your targeted keyword is nowhere near the top of the list, this gives indication that you have a little more work to do and might want to redesign your site for better optimization.  Google Webmaster Tools also lets you see the percentage of your website traffic that originates from those keywords.

For example, let’s say Google detects that your primary keyword is “laptop computer.”  You may think this is a good keyword to go after until seeing that you are ranked #500 and receiving very little traffic for it.  However, when you notice that you ranked #7 for laptop notebook and are generating quality traffic for that keyword, you might then want to re-optimize to achieve even higher rankings.  The information you get back from these tools can prove golden.

Identify Potential Problems

Google Webmaster Tools also offers a feature that allows you to check and see if any dead URLs exist on your site or web pages that the search engine spider can’t get to.  There is another section that tells you if any potential problems related to your site have been found in the text or meta tags.  The package also has a feature that lets you view data for both your internal and inbound links.  This information will you identify the pages on your sites that have links coming in from other sites and what sites they are coming from as well as the pages within your website that have internal links.

Additional Tools and Traffic Boosters

The Tools section of Google Webmaster tools is an area that can help you create a robots.txt page, optimize for Google images, analyze different areas of your site, or remove URLs from the Google search results.  These tools can really prove handy when it comes time to fine tune your site and boost traffic.

Google Webmaster Tools is a must-have for the serious webmaster.  The package offers a number of great features and all of them are free to use.  To get your hands on Google Webmaster Tools, you can purchase a web hosting plan from a host that offers it or simply get it directly from the search engine masters themselves.