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.

If you want to establish a presence in the highly competitive online market, getting yourself listed on the major search engines should not be an option, but a priority.  There are essentially two ways to get your site listed: manually submit it, or optimize your pages in a manner that naturally attracts the search engine robots.  Because manual submission is generally a straightforward process, this article will focus on the harder part, which is fine-tuning your site.

The Importance of HTML Tags

Even if you plan to submit your site to a search engine, it is vital to make sure your pages are optimized to send the spiders crawling.  Ensuring optimization involves implementing keywords and paying attention to your HTML tags.  There are many of these tags and you should make yourself familiar with them if you want yourself to rank well in the search engines.

Title Tags

The title tag can be found at the top of every HTML document and should contain vital information the search engine spiders can use to index your site.  If possible, this is where you want to insert your relevant keywords.

ALT Tags

Though not as important as in past times, ALT tags can still be key to boosting your rankings.  You can get away without them, but since most search engine spiders will be looking for all the text they can cram into the database, it is to your advantage to implement keywords here as well.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are crucial for getting a quality search engine ranking.  These tags appear between the head and body tags at the start of an HTML document.  Similar to the title tag, it provides the search engine spiders with essential information about your site.  Meta tags are such a huge factor because they aid in determining what your site is about and ultimately how your site will be indexed.

Optimizing your HTML tags will make the listing appear more concise, increasing your chances of getting a higher ranking.  Once you get this data together, make sure the text on your site corresponds with the keywords you have elected to use.  Even more important is to ensure that the content on your site is well written and makes sense.  You never want to sacrifice rankings for quality because it could come back to hurt you in the end.  If your site is difficult to navigate and contains grammatical or other errors, the spiders will have a much harder time processing the data.  When tuning your site, remember that optimization should always involve taking care of the search engine and your visitors as well.

Conclusion

During your mission for search engine rankings, be patient and never take your attention away from the other vital aspects that can make your site a success.  The process of getting high listings can be a grueling one but most webmasters find that it is all worth it in the end.