How to Use Google Webmaster Tools, Google Website Optimizer & Google Maps to Help With Your SEO
January 31, 2012 | 
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Google has an enormous range of handy tools for you to use as a way of helping with your SEO and Traffic generation. All of these tools will help you with your SEO.
Google Webmaster Tools – search Google for Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools can give you some very technical information and provides you with detailed reports about your web pages’ visibility on Google. You can see what Google thinks about your pages, you can find out the Top Search Terms being used by your visitors and you can check the amount of inbound links/outbound links etc. You can also submit your site map to Google via Webmaster Tools which will ensure that Google knows about all of your pages. To get Webmaster Tools to work you need to install a small code into your site.
There are also a few other technical bits which you may find interesting.
Google Website Optimizer – search Google for Website Optimizer
Website Optimizer is a tool that can help you improve the effectiveness of your website or web pages. By allowing you to Split Test different versions of your website content, you can determine what content best attracts users to lead them to convert on your site.
Example: You have a Name Squeeze Page where you are offering a Free Report in exchange for your visitors Name and Email Address. Using website optimizer you would test two slightly different versions of that Name Squeeze Page to see which one converts best.
First you need to increase your Traffic, then you need to split test to increase your conversion rate.
If you put all your efforts into SEO and none of your efforts into Split Testing some of your SEO efforts will be wasted.
Again you will need to get your website designer to insert a code into your web pages in order to get website optimizer to work. The key to all successful marketing and online marketing is testing and measuring. It is essential to get the most from your marketing campaigns, and without the numbers how are you going to know what’s working and what’s not.
Google Maps- search Google for Google Maps
By getting your website listed for free in the Local Business Results it can really help you to get traffic to your site.
The Google Map Listings often appear above the rest of the free listings on the left of the Google Page.
You can add all your business details to Google Maps via your Google Account including opening times, photos, videos etc. To activate your Google Maps listing you will need to provide a telephone number or postal address and wait for a verification call or postcard.
Want to know more about how you can get your website listed on the 1st page of Google check out my Free Report: SEO Secrets.
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.
Posted in webmaster google | 
Tags: First Command, Search Engine Traffic, Tens Of Thousands | 
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How to Use Bing Webmaster Tools to Check Your Bing Ranking
Bing Webmaster Tools can easily be used just like Google Webmaster Tools to see how your website is doing in the search engine. To get your website checked out by the tool first you need to register with Microsoft live and create a user name, password, and profile. Next, you can put an xml file into your server or use a small piece of Meta code in the head section of your website. Finally, click on verify and Bing will crawl your website within three days.
Bing’s webmaster dashboard will show you some important information about your website. You will see a clicks percentage or percentage of clicks in Bing. You’ll see impressions, pages indexed, and pages crawled by Bing’s search bots. Another way to see if your pages were crawled by Bing bots is to look at your pages cache in Bing when doing a search. This is also a sign that you have no penalties or sanctions by Bing and that Bing trusts your website or pages. You’ll also get an index summary and traffic summary showing you what terms are being indexed by Bing and the traffic sent to your website. This can be compared to your log files or any analytics programs that you are running on your website such as Google Analytics.
It’s important to keep track of what terms are showing up in the top results and compare them to Google and Yahoo especially during algorithm changes by either search engine. You can also see if Bing has imposed any sanctions or penalties on your website or website pages. If you do have any it’s important to quickly remove what is causing them and let Bing know that the problem has been fixed and that is won’t happen again. You can say that an SEO team was mistakenly hired that was using bad practices that you didn’t know about and that you are very sorry for the trouble caused by them.
Bing Webmaster tools shows you a plethora of information about your website that can easily be juxtaposed and analyzed for SEO and marketing purposed to boost your rankings, website idea share, and conversions.