Posted by Annabel Hodges, Head of search and analytics
As an introduction to the more daily aspects of life as a search marketer and SEO, I thought I’d start by focusing on the basics, covering some of the more practical aspects of implementing simple but effective SEO techniques on any website. First up is SEO tools, and in particular free SEO tools. There are a few free essentials out there that are simple to set up and use but give really strong insight into your site.
Tools are a hot topic in the world of SEO. They can knock hours off your workload, give you a competitive advantage and help ensure you are positioning yourself where you need to be. In today’s market there are hundreds if not thousands of SEO tools out there, and everyone has their pet favourites. However there are some that nobody should be without – whether you are just starting to investigate the role of SEO in the online market or you’re a seasoned expert – these are the tools that can really educate and inform a well-planned strategy.
This week it’s all about Google Webmaster Tools. Google has been gradually adding to this free offering over the last few years, boosting its capabilities significantly over the past few months. Webmasters is free to sign up for, simple to use for verifying your site and it can provide some great insights into your site’s performance. It is also particularly useful for website owners who may not be as familiar with technical areas such the robots.txt file, as it provides the means to address these areas through a simple interface.
The first step is to verify your site. This is very easy to do, either by adding a meta tag to your site’s index file or by uploading a specifically named blank html file to your root. Once this is done, you can get the ball rolling. The Webmasters interface is broken down into four key areas:
1. Site Configuration
Great for getting more of an understanding of the set-up of your site in Google’s eyes – information includes:
- Sitemaps
Create and submit an xml sitemap to Google. Remember, this can now also include video sitemaps to ensure you’re working to increase visibility across all of the Google search functions. Use the Remove URL function to request the removal of any URLs you no longer want featured in search results.
- Crawler Access
Generate and test your robots.txt files. Ensure Google is seeing all the files/pages you want it to see and not those you don’t want it to.
- Sitelinks
These are the links you often see underneath the search snippet, allowing for deep linking straight into other areas of your site. Google generates sitelinks automatically so you cannot dictate which ones are shown, but you can block those you do not want to be shown.
- Site Settings
This allows you to tweak a few key areas, such as specifying the geographic target of your site, setting your preferred domain (with or without the www.) and setting custom crawl rates.
2. Your site on the web
A quick and simple tool to get some idea of the search queries that are sending traffic to your site, and where you rank for them. It also gives you some examples of inbound links to your site, and the anchor text being used in them.
Information includes:
• Top search queries
• Inbound links to your site, and the anchor text used
• Most common keywords found by crawlers on your site
• Internal links
• Subscriber stats
3. Diagnostics
The Diagnostics section serves to flag up any issues that Google has encountered during its crawls of your site. This includes the very useful crawl errors section, crawl stats and HTML suggestions.
- Crawl Errors
This section can prove particularly useful if you have recently moved to a new domain or changed the URL structure of your site as it will flag up all page errors for you. Types of crawl errors flagged up include:
• HTTP errors
• Errors in submitted sitemaps
• URLs not followed
• URLSs not found
• URLs restricted by robots.txt
• URLs timed out
• Unreachable URLs
- HMTL Suggestions
The HTML suggestions section highlights issues with your actual on-page content that, although they won’t prevent your site/pages from actually being indexed, may affect potential rankings and/or user experience. HTML suggestions flag up:
• Duplicate, short or long meta descriptions
• Duplicate, short, long or non-informative title tags
• Non-indexable content on your site
4. New and improved from Google Webmasters
There’s a recent addition to Google Webmasters, known as the Labs section. This where all the new and improved exciting toys that Google has added to its armoury are stored. These include:
- Fetch as Googlebot
This allows a user to see a page exactly as it appears to Google – highlighting for example any images without alt text or poor internal anchor text.
- Malware details
A really useful bonus tool – flags up any malware detected on your site. This is detected by automated scanners that are built to detect malware on any sites that have been indexed by Google. They can then provide examples of the malicious code in this section – this could be something like injected HTML tags or JavaScript.
- Site performance
Key for 2010 – this gives a short and simple overview of your average page load times, a factor officially announced by Google as one of the factors taken into account by its algorithm going forward.
A point to remember: as with all the great tools out there – paid and free – these do give great information and insight, but without the strategy and the human resource behind it, they can’t perform miracles.