Google Webmaster Tools

Ever wanted to see your website through the eyes of Google? Well, you can, with Google's Webmaster Tools. Webmaster tools gives you valuable information on how your website is crawled and indexed by Google, how it's performing within the Google index, and also allows you to share specific information about your site with Google.

Seeing Through the Eyes of Google Using webmaster tools you can see when Google last crawled your website, how often Google crawls your website, and any pages that they've had trouble with. You can then use this information to make the appropriate adjustments to your site. Additionally, this will also show you if there are any problems with your robots.txt file. One other great feature here is that you can view the content on your site and see which words other websites use to link to it.

Measuring Performance Sometimes you can get information like this with your website's stats package, but webmaster tools will show you the top queries that users are typing in to get to your website. Also, if for some reason your website (or certain pages) aren't found in the index, you can fix problems and request that Google re-include you.

Sharing Information You can help Google get a better picture of your website by including a sitemap file. With this file, Google can see how your website is structured, which pages are most important, and how often they change. If you have multiple domain names for your websites (commonly set up as aliases), you can tell Google which domain name you want to use when listing results from a search query.

Check it Out Google Webmaster Tools is a great way for you to see how your site is doing from Google's perspective. It's got a lot of interesting information to offer and is definitely worth a few minutes at least to check it out. Even better, it's free.