Secret Google Commands Every Webmaster Should Know
As a small webmaster one of the things you need to be cognizant of is your competition. What other websites are competing for the same subject your site is about? And further than this you need to know what other websites are serious competitors. How easy will it be for you to get search engine traffic for a subject, a keyword or a long-tail keyword?The normal webmaster might do some preliminary searches on google to get a sense for how many other web pages there are on a particular search term. And this is a nice way to get an initial sense of a keywords competition but it doesn’t give you a sense of the real competition.
There are some google commands that you can use to get a really good look at who is your serious competition and what terms will be easy to get ranking with.
The intitle command is the first command you can use. Google places a very high value on the title of a webpage. It is, after all “the title” of the page so it should be very descriptive of what the page is about. Any serious competition you have for a keyword should have the keyword or keyword phrase right in the title of the page. So you can check this by typing in the search engine: intitle:keywords . Just replace “keywords” with your keyword or string of keywords and the search engine will only return the number of pages with those keywords in the title. You will often see that a search term will return millions of web pages but when you do an in title search you get back only thousands or tens of thousands. This is a very powerful way of identifying which keywords will be easier to capture.
I recommend you start doing this will all the keywords, and keyword variations that you use. And use this tool to identify other keyword possibilities. Using this simple tool will often identify lucrative keyword phrases with very little competition. You can capitalize on these and get ranking quickly and easily.
Another good command is the inurl command. You follow the same format as the first command like this: inurl:keywords. This will return to you all of the web pages that have your keywords in the url of the web page. This is not as powerful as the intitle command but it is still very useful. The search engines consider the url of the page to be an important indicator of what is on the page.If you have two or more keywords you want to check but the order they appear is not important you can use the allinurl command. This command will return pages with all of the keywords somewhere in the url.
As a small webmaster one of the most important things you can do is identify where to spend your time. You want to get the most value for your limited time and using search engine commands is one of the best ways for you to identify keywords and keyword phrases that have high potential with low competition.
Free Google Website Tools Webmasters Should Know About
If you have a website, there are a number of free tools available for webmasters through Google that are absolutely indispensable in helping you increase your website’s visibility and traffic. The Google search engine is one of the most popularly used search tools on the Internet. You can find these tools by going to Google.com and then clicking on business Ranking high in the results for keyword phrases that relate to your products or service is going to increase your traffic and increase your sales. Google provides a number of free tools that help you see exactly how well your website is doing and show you what you need to improve, what pages are not ranking and what is working for you.
Though Google offers a number of different tools for a small fee, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on Google Webmaster Tools. This free service let’s you know a number of pieces of valuable information about your website. First, you have to verify that you own the site by adding a specified meta tag to the header of your home page or upload an HTML file. Once you do this, you will be better equipped to optimize your site.
Google Webmaster Tools: Diagnostics
Googlebot is the web crawler that searches the Internet to find relevant pages that match up with the search terms people enter on Google’s search engine. The diagnostics section focuses on what Googlebot comes up with when it crawls your site as well as your site’s mechanics.
Web Crawl-This shows you if there are any errors or problems that Googlebot encounters when it crawls your site.
Content Analysis-Problems with your site’s meta tags, meta titles and descriptive information will show up here.
Mobile Crawl-Problems and errors on pages designed for mobile phone viewing are found here.
Google Webmaster Tools: Statistics
This set of tools focuses on the traffic that is coming to your site and how it is getting there.
Top Search Queries – Find out which keyword terms people are using that generate your site in the results list, the percentage of clicks you got when pages from your site were shown, and what number on the list pages of your site appear in the Google search engine.
Crawl Stats-this shows you a bar graph of how your pages are faring in PageRank as rated when crawled by Google’s Googlebot. They are shown as ranking high, medium, low or not yet assigned.
Subscriber Stats-If you have subscriber feeds like RSS or Atom available on your site, this will show you how many subscribers you have to those feeds.
What Googlebot Sees-this shows you what phrases and content are used in external links to your site. It helps if these phrases are related to the content, products and services on your site to help generate the appropriate traffic.
Index Stats-this tool lets you see what pages have links to your site and how your pages are indexed by Google.
Google Webmaster Tools: Links
Pages with External Links-Here you will see which pages on your website have inbound links coming from other websites.
Pages with Internal Links-here you can find out which of your pages have links pointing to them from other pages on your site.
Sitelinks-This shows you which of your links may appear directly in Google’s search results.
Google Webmaster Tools: Tools
There are a number of other tools that you can utilize free of charge as well. For example, you can submit a site map with all the pages on your site to expedite the process of including every page in your site on Google’s search engine. You can also:
Analyze robots.txt
Generate robots.txt
Set Geographic Target
Enhanced Image Search
Manage Site Verification
Set Crawl Rate
Set Preferred Domain
Remove URLs
Before you invest in any pricey ranking tools or analytic software, check out what Google has to offer for free!