Welcome back Rankers. Look a quick review this week of google webmaster tools. They’ve had a bit of a makeover there, and there are a few things that you really should be using but you probably don’t even know about. But one of the interesting things that I’ve always liked about google webmaster tools is some of the diagnostics that you get back, that tell you how people are reaching your site, how many pages google is crawling, what pages it is crawling, and generally just some really powerful information to give you feedback about how people are reaching your site and how people are using your site. Also of course though, if you are ever going to move your site to another url and change your domain name completely then you really need to get on google webmaster tools. It can give you a lot of information, and a lot of help to make sure the process goes as smooth as possible and also as I’ve mentioned before, it’s really good, if you are in the expo markets, to help reach local search engines. So it’s like google.co.hk, and who knows what. So if you’re trying to reach/appear in pages form in specific countries that google has the search engine for, then you need to get into google’s webmaster tools, and it will help you do that. You won’t have to build a whole other site for each country to do that, which is really good. One of the other things it will do though, it will tell you whose linking to your site and what pages are actually linking to. Google webmaster tools will do that. You can just go into google type link: and then the name of your site, and google will return the number of links. Basically its a random sample of who is actually linking to your site, (if you want to know who is linking to your site) and the whole list that google knows about, then you need to set up googles webmaster tools and you can find that out. But what I find really interesting is it looks at the pages and, of course in our case, the root page is always going to be the most popular. Then we’ve got all these other pages that are getting links, and why I find that really helpful and interesting is that I can go and find out, I can go to and find out, OK, well there’s this page down here “professional speaking”, and its got x amount of links to it, and I actually want to rank at another speaking phrase at the moment, so that’s really good to know now, because I didn’t realize that before, but there’s forty or so external links to that page. Well, that means I can go to that page and link over to my other speaking page, and that’s quite regarded as a speaking page because its got forty other people linking to it which will then, the next page that I link to/from that is going to inherit some of that love, and because its also about speaking its going to be even more important for it, so you can start to do these sorts of things within your site when you have this information in front of you.
Of course, there are a lot of tools out there, like, even Yahoo search engine, a lot of people use to find out whose backlinking to them and all the rest of it. The reason I like google’s webmaster tools, is because it shows me the ones google cares about and knows about, and at the end of the day that’s the only search engine I am worried about at the moment, in Australia. Maybe bing in the future, hopefully bing, nothing like good competition, but certainly at the moment it’s just google, so go into webmaster tools, have a play with that, and you can start to get the idea of why maybe you are getting traffic to certain areas of your site but not others. It will tell you what things are ranking and what people are actually clicking on and the things that are ranking, and it will also help you find errors in your site and why google is maybe kicking you out of the ranking to begin with, and if it’s all too hard then give us a call and we’ll do it for you.
Thanks very much, we’ll see you next week, bye.
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