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Posts Tagged “google tools”

Aug 02 2008

Let The Search Engines Help You!

Posted by: Stuart Reid in Traffic, Web Design, learning

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Traffic can come from many places. Apart from your regular visitors - perhaps fans of your site, visitors from your e-mail promotions, or contributors to your forum - those folk who find you from a search query are among the best.

These are qualified, pre-screened, visitors. They have come to your site expecting to find whatever it is they are looking for. And it’s the search engines job to match these searches with quality content.

The big search engines DO want you in their listings. Honestly - they’re not trying to exclude you, heck… they need you!

To that end they all provide various tools and guidelines to (a) ensure you meet the strict quality control and (b) ensure you are found for the right terms.

Google

Currently, the #1 search engine by almost every ranking method known to man. Google’s help and advice can be found at their Webmaster Central.

This section of their site includes their webmaster tools, their comprehensive Analytics software, their Optimizer to help you rank better, and information on submitting content: such as products, books, rss feeds, local listings and more.

The aforementioned tools are also worth a thorough look. Here you’ll find the all important Sitemap area where you can specify what pages on your site are indexed, and view statistics on the search terms you are found for and more.

Yahoo

Yahoo don’t offer an all in one webmaster area like Google, but you may find these links helpful:

Add Your URL To Yahoo - unless you want a paid submission, it’s usually quicker to get crawled from a link on a already listed URL. There are, however, special areas for submitting media and mobile sites.

Site Explorer - See what pages you have listed.

Other Yahoo Links - Webmaster Guidelines, Marketing Services etc.

MSN

Despite Microsofts efforts MSN Search isn’t as popular as the other two. They do however have a useful section at their latest incarnation, Live.com

Live.Com Webmaster Tools includes validation and authentication tools, guidelines, technical support, and a webmaster forum. Typical of Microsoft this looks rather corporate and the links can be confusing, but dig around and there’s quality information there