Trying to get more visitors to your site is not something you should do without having as many website optimization tools and services as possible. After all, there are so many useful and easy to use tools out there on the net, it’s a shame not to take advantage of them. With many of these tools being free or inexpensive, being able to optimize your website will be easier than ever before. Here are some great online tools and services that will make your optimization efforts more effective than ever.
Sitemaps
Ever wonder how crawlers come across your site? Sitemaps are what give out the hints to big search engines about what’s out there. Using sitemaps can help search engines pick up on your site more rapidly, and also can help properly categorize it. You can make your own sitemaps, or have someone else do it for you.
Robot Instructions
Things such as Robots.txt and other similar instructionals tell crawlers which pages they should categorize, which they should skip over, as well as other instructions. Many guides exist online that explain how to use these to their full potential. Similarly, using the code “rel=noFollow” also will allow you to remove the advantages your competition has when you link out to their site.
Google Webmaster Tools
Perhaps the most effective bunch of tools a webmaster could ever find, this series of tools has multiple categories that make it a web optimization powerhouse.
- Settings – This allows you to set the very basic nuts and bolts of web optimization as well as the preferred URLs that you want crawlers to hit.
- Diagnostics – Did you ever have one of those days where everything you seem to do goes awry? Well, it happens with website optimization, too. When you run the diagnostic tools that Google gives you, you can actually see whether or not you’ve been hit with malware, whether crawlers have been having a lot of errors, and even whether or not you are doing everything possible with your HTML coding to improve your optimization efforts.
- Website Responsiveness – See if you have a mobile friendly website or not, and what might be the problems with your mobile version of your site.
- Your Site On The Web – This webmaster tool genre is amazing when it comes to giving you real insight on where you stand on the net, and what your search engine optimization efforts are doing to your site’s ranking. You also get to see your click-through rates, as well as the top pages that are delivered in search engine results.
- +1 Metrics – Social media is king with a lot of search engine optimization efforts, especially when it comes to Google’s +1 function. This allows you to track your progress in Google Plus, and also check out who is promoting posts related to your site.
- Site Configuration – Want to submit your sitemaps, test out your own robots.txt files, or fix up all the addresses that can get changed when you move domains? This is the category of Google Webmaster tools to go to. People who are big fans of this tool set say that it makes managing the technical aspects of website optimization a lot easier – especially for those who really dislike dealing with too much coding.
To get to google webmaster took you can go to this website: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. To set up an account with them you will have to create an email account and insert a meta tag code on your website. You can also upload an html file. After you have set up your google webmaster tool please don’t forget to go and submit your website sitemap, in the sitemap section. This will tell google exactly what pages you want to index and when you will make an update will tell google that you have added more content to your website that will need to be crawled.
The Bing Webmaster Center
Not to be outdone by Google, Microsoft’s Bing search engine came up with their own slew of webmaster tools available to those who want to improve their results with Bing. Before you ask, yes, you can sign up for both Google and Bing webmaster services.
- Traffic – This Bing tool monitors your site traffic, and also combines the results you’re getting from both Bing and Yahoo. Unlike Google, this tool also can give you a cost estimate of how much you’d end up paying for advertising based on the keywords you choose.
- Index – This is the Bing answer to Google’s Site Configuration. Here, webmasters choose how Bing indexes their site, and fix mistakes that crawlers may have made.
- Overview and Crawl Stats – Both of these tools give you a basic idea of how well your SEO efforts have been doing, and also tell you how frequently crawlers are hitting your site. This monitors stuff like clicks, impressions, and how many crawler errors have occurred in the recent months. This allows you to help Bing prioritize your site, and also control what kind of impression your site gives on the net.
To create a Bing Webmaster account you can go to this url: www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster The same thing like google webmaster tool you need to set up your account with an email address and then to the website verification. Also don’t forget to submit the .xml sitemap file.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is another important tool that will help you in finding out what you type of traffic is coming to your website and how many visitors you are getting each day.
Here are some of the features that you can see within the tool:
- Detail Reporting – you will be able to see how many visitors you had to your website, the region are they coming from, number of sessions, unique visitors, average time on site, bounce rate, language that they are speaking, browser, what pages they have visited, etc
- Real Time – This is a feature that will show you what exactly who is visiting your website in real time.
- Acquisition – get detail report from where the visitors are coming from. You can see who came to your website from your: paid traffic, organic, social media, referral or any other custom campaign.
To install Google Analytics you will have to add an script on each page that you want to track. Most of the time if you want to track all of the pages of the website you will need to add the custom code withing the header or footer section of the website. To get access to the Google Analytics visit this link: www.google.com/analytics
The coolest thing about being able to use SEO tools and services is that it has a much, much more powerful impact on your overall results than simply blogging and using social media alone. So, if you feel like you’re being stuck in a rut by your optimization efforts, it may be time to look into more tools that are being offered for webmasters who really, truly care about their traffic and their websites. They’re easy enough for anyone to use!
