If a visitor comes to your site and due to a missing link can’t find the information they need, then you’re missing out on valuable traffic. Thankfully there are some easy tools out there to track such errors.

One of the tools I’ve used for a long time is Google Webmaster Tools. I wrote a review of this a few months ago. The service it provides is free too.

One of the features offered by Google Webmaster Tools is an analysis of any errors encountered by Google whilst indexing your web site. The Google Webmaster Help Center page provides more information on what this indexing process involves.

The more Google knows about your web site structure, the greater chance there is of increased traffic being driven to your site. It is therefore a good idea to track down and fix broken links.

Under the Diagnostic tab of Google Webmaster Tools you will find a report of any errors reported by Google whilst indexing your site. The web crawl page splits any errors into several categories, such as pages not found or unreachable. The ultimate goal is to have a screen looking like this. This image shows zero errors for each category.

The categories I focus on are “Not Found” and “Unreachable URLs”. Any errors in these categories indicates a possible broken link somewhere on your web site. I use the word ‘possible’ because there are other reasons that Google may not have found the page it was looking for, such as your web site being down or the network on your web host timing out.

If you see any errors here then you can click on the appropriate link to see a detailed list of web pages where errors occurred. The Google web crawl errors page goes into this subject in more detail if you’re interested.

For months this Diagnostic page would regularly show errors for my web site. Recently I changed the theme on this site and fixed a few errors in some of my WordPress template files and that seems to have made a big difference. Since making these changes several older articles on this site are now performing very well in search engine rankings. In some cases I’ve seen spectacular increases in traffic.

This increase in traffic may just be coincidence, or it could be that Google is now able to index these older articles. Either way, it is worth keeping an eye on this type of information. You could add it to a list of regular web site housekeeping tasks that you perform once or twice the year.

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

Today I am continuing my review of WordPress plugins used on this site. This posts looks at the WP-PageNavi WordPress plugin. You can see it in action at the bottom of my home page.

If you look at the bottom of most blog home pages you will see a Next and Previous link which allow visitors to view older or more recent blog posts. I’ve no idea whether many people use these links, but they are only really useful for finding posts created in the last few weeks or so. These links are not very practical for finding posts buried deep in your blog archives.

I’ve also read that web crawlers don’t like these Next and Previous links either. These crawlers (also known as web spiders or robots) are small pieces of software (called bots) sent out by search engines such as Google to index your blog. Most crawlers like to be able to get to any page on your blog within a few clicks. If a crawler can’t get to each page in a few clicks then you are making it more difficult for your blog to be indexed by the search engines.

It has been suggested that replacing the Next and Previous links with a pagination structure as follows is more friendly to crawlers trying to index your site.

1 2 3 4 5 »…Last »

Each of the page numbers is a hyperlink which the user can click on to jump to that page. This enables visitors to access older articles with fewer clicks, and web crawling spiders will like it too.

You can customize the pagination look and feel via the plugin options page.

There are other methods to help visitors access older articles on your blog which personally I think are more effective than the pagination plugin. These can include creating a site map which lists all your blog posts and pages on a single page, or an archives page, both of these topics I will go into in more detail in later posts.

Even so, I think having a page navigation system like WP-PageNavi can do harm in trying to maximize your site’s accessibility.

How do you navigate around blogs and other web sites you visit? Do you ever use the Next and Previous links?

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

I’d like to summarize the recent series I ran on Webmaster and SEO tools. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series and found something useful. In case you missed any of the posts here is a recap:

Part 1 discussed the Webmaster Toolkit which provides lots of useful tools to manage and maintain your domains.

Part 2 covered Google Webmaster Tools which can be used to perform tasks like submitting site maps to Google, analyzing links to your site, which search queries are effective in driving traffic to your site, and other statistics.

Part 3 covered XML Sitemaps which helps your web sites become more search engine friendly.

Part 4 looked at tools to analyze your web traffic, such as Google Analytics and Clicky.

Part 5 discussed how to maximize your feeds using Feedburner.

Part 6 looked at how MyBlogLog can be used to help build up a community around your web site, and further ways to analyze traffic to your site.

Before finishing, I would like to mention one site that I have found very useful in improving the overall search ranking of my site. Back in December 2006, Chris Pearson ran a series on SEO for everybody. That series covered the following topics:

• Creating site maps to make your site more search engine friendly
• Using an XHTML Sitemap for better search engine indexing
• Constructing dynamic, descriptive web page titles
• How to harness image search results from Google

I strongly recommend you take the advice of that series. Don’t expect to get results overnight, it may take weeks or even months, but believe me it works.

Look at my Top 5 sources of traffic between mid November and mid December 2006. Google is top, but the overall number of referrals isn’t that high.

Now compare that with the Top 5 sources of traffic for the last month. Google is still top, but the overall number of referrals has increased dramatically.

Several articles I have written now rank within the top 5 of Google. If you’ve haven’t read Chris’ series on SEO for everybody then take a look and reap the rewards.

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

Welcome to the 6th article in the series on Webmaster and SEO Tools. In previous articles I have discussed how web sites like Google Analytics, Clicky and Feedburner can be used to analyze traffic to your web site.

Today I am going to continue the theme of analytics and discuss MyBlogLog. Not only does MyBlogLog provide statistics on traffic to your web site, it is also an excellent way to promote, market and connect with visitors to your web site.

A good introduction to what MyBlogLog is all about can be found on the MyBlog About page. If you like what you read then the next step is to visit their home page and register.

MyBlogLog Home Page

Once you’ve registered and logged into your account you are taken to your home page. This page will show you the most recent readers to your site, your MyBlogLog friends and contacts, any messages sent to you, plus a roundup of what is happening in other communities. This is what my home page looks like.

MyBlogLog Account Tools

The first thing you want to do is use the ‘Account Tools’ section on the Home Page sidebar to edit your profile and add any web sites or blogs you author.

You’ll also notice the following options on your home page, where you can view stats for your web site, get widgets for your site and edit other settings.

View Site Stats

The stats page will show you where readers came from, what they viewed, and what links they clicked. I like this page because it provides a very good executive type dashboard view where I can see at a glance what is happening on my site.

Click on the thumbnail below to see an example of what the stats page looks like.

You can also run reports on what users have clicked and viewed on your web site together with a list of referrals to your site. These reports can be customized to cover any time frame you like, previous day, week, month, etc.

If you click on the thumbnail below you can see what the reports page looks like.

In order for MyBlogLog to record these stats you need to enter a piece of javascript tracking code onto your web site. A good place for this would be in the header, footer or sidebar. I’ll go into this in more detail in the next section on widgets.

It is also worth mentioning that there is a free and Pro version of the stats. If your site gets a lot of traffic and you’re interested in seeing stats in real time then the Pro version may be for you. Pro costs $25 for a years membership or you can pay $3 per month if you don’t want to commit to a years membership up-front. If you only check your stats every couple of days, then the free version is probably the ticket for you. More information can be found on the MyBlogLog help page.

MyBlogLog Widgets

MyBlogLog provides you with widgets which you can add to your site. These widgets are essentially a piece of javascript which you add to your web site. This javascript also contains a piece of tracking code which is used to gather all the stats information about your site such as visitor numbers and what pages they viewed.

You can see one of these widgets in action on this blog. In the sidebar I have a widget which shows recent MyBlogLog members who have visited this blog. I like having this feature on my web site. It provides a way for me and other visitors to connect with other people who visit this site. It has also enabled me to discover other MyBlogLog member web sites and communities, so it is a great way to build up a network of contacts and friends.

MyBlogLog also provide a Top 5 Links widget which is updated hourly. This widget can be used to show the current most popular links on your web site. This widget also contains the tracking code for web stats.

If you’re not interested in having any widgets on your site then you can just add the tracking code on it’s own.

MyBlogLog Communities

The communities section of MyBlogLog is a great way to connect with other members and also to discover some pretty cool and interesting web sites. It is also a great way to promote your own web site. You can see at a glance who has joined your community, recent readers to your site, Top 5 Links on your site, plus the latest blog posts from your site. You can also send messages to other community members.

It’s a great way to connect with your readers. I always like to take some time to see who has visited my site. I’ve found some really useful contacts and MyBlogLog communities through doing this.

Summary

MyBlogLog is a great way to promote and market your web site and it provides excellent opportunities for networking with fellow bloggers. It is also a great way to discover web sites you might otherwise not come across. The MyBlogLog stats don’t go into the level of detail like Google Analytics or Clicky but if you’re looking for an executive dashboard view of visitor numbers it is an excellent tool.

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

This is the 5th in the series on Webmaster and SEO tools. To make it easier to know what each article in the series is about I am now including some additional text at the end of the post title. It therefore comes as no surprise that today I am going to cover Feedburner!

What is FeedBurner?

Well, each blog has a feed. Let’s say your web site is called www.example.com, typically your feed address will be www.example.com/feed. Visitors can subscribe to your feed using this feed address, but that’s about it. You have no way of knowing for example how many people have subscribed to your feed or for analyzing how many people visit your web site as a result of using your feed.

In addition the feed address is not very user friendly, the feed is displayed in your web browser as a bunch of XML statements. For a software developer like myself this is fine, but for people unfamiliar with XML it is hardly going to encourage people to subscribe to your feed. I’ll go into more detail about this later.

Why do I need FeedBurner?

This is where FeedBurner is useful. FeedBurner enables you to keep track of how many people have subscribed to your feed, plus a host of other stats. FeedBurner also helps you to optimize and publicize your site making it easier for people to subscribe to your feed. There is a really good overview of what FeedBurner has to offer on their blogs page.

FeedBurner Details

In this article I am going to discuss some of the features I find most useful in FeedBurner. If you are not already a member of FeedBurner then you will need to register first. Once you’re registered you can then create your FeedBurner feed. This process is well explained on the FeedBurner website so I won’t go into any detail here.

Once you’ve registered and created your feed you can then start analyzing, optimizing and publicizing your feed.

Analyzing your feed

When you login to your FeedBurner account the first item you will see is the Analyze tab. This page gives a nice overview of how many people have subscribed to your feed and what reader they used to subscribe to your feed, for example Google Reader, Netvibes, Rojo etc. In addition you can analyze how your feed subscription has developed over a given time period.

If you look at the bottom left of the above screenshot you will see a link for Total Stats Pro. If you want to get up close and personal with your audience then this is for you. Total Stats Pro provides even more stats on things like item views and clickthroughs from your feed. This used to be a paid service, but now Feedburner is part of the Google family, this service is now provided free of charge.

Optimizing your feed

There are loads of options on this page as you can see in the screenshot below, so I will cover just the main ones which I find most interesting.

The first of these is the Browser Friendly option. As I mentioned earlier, without FeedBurner your feed address will just appear as a bunch of raw XML statements in your browser. This doesn’t make pleasant viewing for visitors to your web site. Browser Friendly will take these raw XML statements and present them in a much more user friendly way in your browser as shown below.

As you can see, the feed is displayed in an easy to read way, and there are a series of buttons which enable people to subscribe to your feed using one of the many popular feed reader applications. There is one important thing to bear in mind which I’ll show in the following screenshot.

Pay attention to the checkbox which says ‘Landing page renders as a web page in all browsers’. I had to make sure that checkbox was checked before I could get a user friendly display of my feed in the browser. Without that checkbox checked, I would get a display as follows.

This doesn’t look as ugly as a bunch of raw XML statements, but it isn’t as nice looking as the earlier screenshot. It looks like this is Firefox trying to take over control of how to subscribe to my feed. So, if you want a user friendly view of your feed with all the subscriber buttons to Google Reader, Netvibes, Rojo, etc. then make sure you have that checkbox checked.

Next up is FeedFlare. This enables your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including links to social bookmarking sites at the bottom of your blog posts and feed. There are plenty of WordPress plugins out there which will allow you to include social bookmark links underneath each blog post, but the FeedFlare is the only way I know to achieve a similar thing in your feed.

Publicizing your feed

This page presents a series of options designed to help you attract subscribers to your site. One of the features I use on this page is the Email Subscriptions option.

This provides another mechanism for people to receive your feed. You cannot assume that every visitor to your site uses, or is familiar with, feed readers. Providing the option for visitors to receive blog updates via email is an excellent tool which I recommend you install on your site. About 10% of my readers subscribe via email so it does work in attracting subscribers. You simply activate the Email Subscriptions option in FeedBurner and then copy and paste the HTML provided anywhere you like on your blog, like the sidebar for example.

Another option I find useful is PingShot. This will automatically notify sites like Technorati, My Yahoo, Newsgator, etc. when you publish a new post. You can achieve the same thing within WordPress but I prefer to manage pinging these services from within FeedBurner.

FeedBurner Summary

There is far more to FeedBurner than I can cover in this article. I’ve found FeedBurner to be an excellent tool in analyzing my feed traffic and helping people to subscribe to my feed. It has helped in publicizing my web site and it is another useful tool in promoting and marketing your web site. Go burn that feed and reap the rewards!

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

The previous 3 posts in this series have looked at ways of analyzing and boosting traffic to your web site. Today I am going to delve deeper into the analytics side of things.

Learning how visitors discover your site, what they do at your site once they get there, and how they leave your site, can provide a useful insight into the type of audience you’re attracting. This information can be used to gain a better understanding of your visitors, such as which posts are the most popular, how visitors navigate around your site, or provide clues on how you can reorganize your web site to better cater for your visitors.

There are a host of Analytics packages out there, either standalone or as a WordPress plugin. I am going to cover three such packages today, Google Analytics and new kid on the block Clicky Web Analytics, and finally the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin.

Google Analytics

This is probably the best known analytics packages so I will start with this one first. The Google Analytics Home Page is probably the best place to start. This page will give you a brief overview of what it has to offer together with a product demo. You will need an existing Google Account service such as GMail before you can use the service, otherwise you will need to register first.

Once you’ve registered you will need to login to your Google Analytics account and add your website. The instructions are easy to follow. Once you’ve added your web site you are given a piece of tracking code which you need to add to your web site. This code will track all the user activity on your web site. If you use WordPress or some other blogging platform then a good place to put the tracking code would be in the header, footer or sidebar, as these items are displayed on every page on your site.

If you use WordPress then I recommend you take a look at the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. The plugin will automate the process of adding the tracking code to your web site, and the plugin is highly configurable.

Once the tracking code has been added you need to wait up to 24 hours for Google to start collecting the tracking information. You will then be able to login to your Google Analytics account and view the reports on your web site. The reports provide you with a dashboard type view. The reports cater for three user personas – executive, marketer and webmaster. You can select one of these personas from the View dropdown and the reports available will adjust accordingly.

I won’t go into exhaustive detail on each report available, but the following areas I find most interesting. The first is the Executive Summary which provides you with a graph showing the number of visitors over the last week, and pie charts showing ratio of new versus returning visitors and the number of referrals, and finally a map showing the location of your visitors. Here is an example of what this looks like. You can customize the view to cover whatever date range you like, such as weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.

Next is the Marketing Summary which shows the top referrals to your site, the top search engine keywords used to get to your site, and the top campaigns. This is useful for seeing at a glance where traffic is coming from to your site.

The Content Summary report will show you how long visitors stay on a particular page, whether they exit your site after reading a single page, or whether they continue their visit and look at other pages on your site. This is a good way at analyzing whether your content is retaining visitors. You can track this information over time which is a good way to see if particular campaigns are more successful at retaining visitors than others.

As you can see above, several pages have a high bounce rate which means people often leave the site after reading a single page. The lower the bounce percentage figure the better.

Finally there is the Site Overlay report. This will show the most commonly visited links on your page. This can be useful in refining your web site design to focus on the higher quality links.

There is a lot more to Google Analytics then I can cover in this post. The best thing to do is to explore the site yourself. There is a lot of information on campaigns, advertising success and ROI then I haven’t even touched upon.

For the average user though, some people might find the number of reports in Google Analytics daunting, it also could be improved from a usability perspective too. I would like to see hyperlinks included in the report, especially around the area of referrals, so I can be taken to the exact spot where a visitor came from. This is where the next analytics package excels.

Clicky Web Analytics

If you like simple to understand reports, with an easy to navigate UI and hyperlinks that take you to the exact spot a visitor came from, then maybe this is the package for you. It is free to register and installation is similar to Google Analytics, involving placing some tracking code on your web site. Their home page gives a good comparison of how Clicky stacks up against the competition. You can also try out a demo for yourself.

Here is an example of what your home page looks like when you login to your Clicky account. The report is plain and simple and I like the hyperlinks on the left which I can click on for further details.

You will notice at the top of this screenshot is a series of tabs which you can click on for further information.

The first of these tabs is the Visitors page. This will provide detailed information about your visitors, where they came from, what operating system they are using, what screen resolution they are using etc. What makes this page different from Google Analytics is a hyperlink to the Actions page. This provides an audit trail of each visitor to your site, how they found your site, what page they visited first, what other pages they visited, and what page they left your site. The report is in a clear and easy to understand format and far easier to digest than Google Analytics.

Next is the Content page which will provide information on top content and entrance and exit points. The Links page will show you the top incoming and outgoing links plus the top referrers. The Searches page will show the search engine keywords used to get to your site. There is also an interesting Spy page where you can look at user activity in real time and an RSS page where you subscribe to web site activity.

I have been using Clicky for almost a week now alongside Google Analytics without any issues. It is still in development and there are areas which you can’t drill into yet, such as viewing stats over multiple days, but this is being worked on by the author and will be available as a new feature soon.

You can catch up on all the latest developments and news at their blog. I did notice on their blog that they had a couple of issues recently with their Apache server, it looks like Clicky is hosted on a shared rather than a dedicated server but that shouldn’t be an issue. Hopefully these issues will be few and far between.

Overall this looks an impressive analytics package and is certainly one to keep on your radar.

Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress

For those of you that don’t want to register with any analytics provider, then consider trying one of the many WordPress plugins out there. One of these is the popularity contest plugin from Alex King. Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. You can view these figures from your WordPress administration panel and you can also display this information in your blog, such as in the sidebar.

If you use any caching plugin, like wp-cache, it will affect the ability of Popularity Contest to accurately record views. I’ve recently installed wp-cache so I will probably have to disable the Popularity Contest plugin now.

Summary

That sums up this article on analytics packages. There is something there for everyone, whether you want detailed statistics at every level or just an overview. If you want to get to know your visitors better then I recommend you take a closer look at one of the analytics packages out there.

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

This is the third post in my series looking at Webmaster and SEO tools. Today I am going to look at XML Sitemaps which I briefly discussed in my previous article in this series.

In a nutshell, a sitemap will enable search engines like Google and Yahoo to better crawl and index your site. The more these search engines know about your web site structure, the greater chance there is of increased traffic being driven to your site.

Introduction

A good place to start for an overview is sitemaps.org. They provide the following definition of a sitemap:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

If you want to go into more detail regarding the structure of these sitemaps then I suggest you read their protocol page. This will give you an example of a basic XML sitemap together with an explanation of each of the tags that make up the XML sitemap file.

Submitting Sitemaps to the Major Search Engines

So how do you go about creating one of these XML sitemaps and submitting it to the search engines?

If you’re using WordPress then I recommend you take a look at the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. This plugin generates an XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Whenever you change, edit, create or publish a post, the plugin will automatically update your sitemap and ping the new sitemap to Google. It’s a great solution for people who want to simply install a plugin and then forget about it.

If you’re not using WordPress, or you run into problems using the plugin, then there a host of web sites which offer a free online service which will generate a sitemap for you.

The one I am currently using is XML-Sitemaps.com. This site provides a free online sitemap generator. You simply enter your website address and then press the start button. You then wait a few minutes for it to crawl your site. The end result is an XML file which you can then save to your computer. You then submit this XML file to Google. They also provide a Text sitemap which you can submit to Yahoo.

These online XML sitemap generators works fine for small sized web sites but for a large web site containing thousands of links then it may not be a viable option. The XML sitemap generator will also report any broken links on your web site, but you have to pay the small sum of $5 before you can access this information. When I generated my sitemap it reported over 200 broken links, so I decided to pay the $5 to see what these were. It turned out that every broken link was simply a link to my Feedburner feed which I have on each page on my web site. I’m not sure why it reports this as a broken link?

Once you have your XML sitemap saved on your computer, the next step is to submit the sitemap to the major search engines. There are three main options available.

1. If you’re using Google Webmaster Tools then you need to logon to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add the sitemap, more details on this are covered in my previous article in this series.

2. You can modify your robots.txt file to include a line which specifies the location of your sitemap. This will enable crawlers to automatically find your sitemap the next time they crawl your site. More details on this procedure can be found on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

3. Submit your sitemap using an HTTP request. You simply enter the following into a browser, replacing {searchengine_URL} with the URL provided by the search engine.

{searchengine_URL}/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

Summary

That just about covers sitemaps for now. They’re pretty easy to setup and maintain and I recommend you invest the time to get a sitemap setup on your web site. If you use sitemaps in conjunction with other SEO tips then you increase the likelihood of traffic coming to your site.

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

This is the second post in my series looking at Webmaster and SEO tools. Today I am going to look at Google Webmaster Tools. These are a set of free tools designed to make your web site more Google friendly and improve your site’s visability. The tools also help diagnose problems with your site, such as broken links.

You will though need a Google account before you can take advantage of these free tools. If you’re not already using any Google Account services like GMail then you will need to create a Google account first.

Google Webmaster Tools

We’ll begin by looking at the Google Webmaster Tools home page. There are several useful links on this page, but probably the best one to start with is the Google Webmaster Central page. This provides a good overview of what these tools have to offer and provides several useful links if you want to delve deeper into a particular area. It covers the following areas:

Site Status Wizard

This can be used to find out whether your site is currently being indexed by Google. Just enter your web site address and click the Next button.

Google’s blog for webmasters

This is quite a useful blog to subscribe to if you want to keep up-to-date with how Google indexes and crawls your sites.

Webmaster tools (including Sitemaps)

This link provides statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s crawling and indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission and reporting. I’ll be delving into this area in more detail shortly.

Google’s discussion group for webmasters

This link allows you to talk to other webmasters about any queries or problems you have with your site, plus provide feedback to the Google webmaster team. Google employees occasionally post tips in this discussion group too so it is worth keeping a lookout for these.

Submit your content to Google

This section will help you learn about submitting content for Google properties such as Google Base and Google Book Search. I haven’t expored this area yet but it looks interesting.

Webmaster help center

Use this section to find answers to frequently asked questions about crawling, indexing, ranking and other webmaster issues.

That’s enough of an overview. Time to delve into the area which I think you’ll find most interesting, the Google Webmaster tools (including Sitemaps) page. Once you’ve logged into your Google account you can then start using the tools.

The first step is to add your web site. Once that is done you will then be prompted to verify your site. This is to prove that you are the owner of the web site. By verifying your site you can access comprehensive statistics and crawl errors about the pages in your site. There are two methods of verification. You can either upload an HTML file with a name that Google specifies, or you can add a META tag to your site’s index file.

Once your site has been verified the next step is to add an XML sitemap. A sitemap will allow Google to more easily index and crawl your web site. There are several ways you can create a sitemap. If you’re using WordPress then take a look at the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin.

This is an excellent plugin which will create an XML sitemap of your WordPress blog each time you update your blog with a new post. The sitemap is then automatically pinged to Google and Yahoo. If you’re looking for a simple hassle-free sitemap generator then it is worth a closer look. I’ve used this plugin on previous blogs before with success. I’ve run into some issues with it recently, but I think that is more to do with my WordPress installation or other plugins I’m using, rather than a fault with the Google Sitemap Generator plugin.

If your web site is not powered by WordPress, or you prefer not to use the plugin mentioned above, then there are other alternatives. The topic of XML Sitemaps is quite large though, so I will be covering that in more detail in a later post in this series.

Once you’ve registed your sitemap with Google you will need to wait a few hours for Google to download and process the sitemap. Once that is done you will have access to detailed statistics about your web site. The next step is to return to the page where you first added your web site to Google. You should see a table with your web site listed inside. If you click on that link it will take you to the Webmaster Tools page where you can access detailed information about your site.

The Webmaster Tools page provides four sections:

Diagnostics

This provides a summary page of your web site where you can look at any errors that Google encountered whilst crawling your site.

Statistics

My favourite area in this section is the information provided on query stats. The information in this section will show you at a glance what search terms are proving successful in driving traffic to your web site.

This shows the top search queries, together with the average top positions. Using this page you can easily see which search terms people entered in Google to get to your web site. The average top position is useful too, the lower the number the better. A figure around 10 or below would mean your web site is appearing on the front page of Google for that particular search query. I haven’t managed a number 1 position yet, although I’ve got quite a few at number 2 and 3

Links

This is another good one. It shows all the external and internal links in your web site. The list of external links will show all the other web sites that link to your site. This can be useful in discovering other links to your site which you may have been unaware of.

Sitemaps

This section shows the current status of your XML Sitemap. It shows the date and time you last submitted your sitemap and when the sitemap was last downloaded by Google. It also shows the number of URL’s referenced in the sitemap.

Summary

That sums up Google Webmaster Tools. I mainly use the tools to submit my sitemap when I update my web site, plus I occasionally dip into the Links section to see who is linking to my site. The information it provides is useful in showing ‘at a glance’ type details, but it is not that useful in drilling down into more details, for example it doesn’t show what the top external links are. I would recommend using this in conjunction with other tools like Google Analytics to gain a greater insight into how traffic is driven to your site.

Next week I will covering the next topic in this series so stay tuned.

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.

I’ve written a couple of posts before about how to boost your blog traffic, covering topics like search engine optimization (SEO) and general web site design.

I am going to write a few more posts over the next few weeks covering some of the topics I have learnt over the last few months.

These posts will cover useful sites I have come across recently, which bloggers and webmasters may find useful, plus a roundup of some of the tools I use on a regular basis.

First on the menu are some webmaster tools. I’m going to cover one web site today, but I’ll be reviewing some other sites over the coming weeks.

Webmaster Toolkit

Today I will look at the Webmaster Toolkit. This site has a wealth of information which you can navigate by browsing the topics listed in the left hand sidebar on their web site. These cover topics like SEO tools, web utilities, domain tools, HTML tools and finally a list of resources. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

SEO Tools

If you’re interested in marketing and promoting your web site then this is the section for you. In here you can find tools which will help you decide what keywords to use on your site, how popular your site is with the major search engines, how search spiders crawl your site, and various other analysis tools.

Web Utilities

If you’re interested in analyzing or tweaking your web site then check out this section. The two that you might find most useful are the .htaccess generator which is useful if you want to password protect part of your web site, and the Link Checker which will report any broken links on your site.

Domain Tools

There are a few interesting tools in this section. The two I like are the Domain Name Generator which will produce a list of possible domain name ideas based on a word or phrase you input. The other one is the Expired Domain Name Checker which could be a useful tool for improving both your link popularity and your website traffic whilst saving you money too! There are many expired domains still listed in many of the big directories, with the potential to drive large amounts of traffic to your site.

HTML Tools

There are couple of tools in this section which will clean up any un-needed code created by Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. There is also the CSS Menu Generator which might be useful if you want to generate some navigation buttons on your site.

Summary

That’s it for now. Have a good look round the webmaster toolkit. The above is just a small sample of what is available. Whether you’re a novice or advanced webmaster, there are some useful tools and utilities available.

© Dean Taplin - Gadget reviews from Technical Itch.