When was the last time Google visited you?

You probably visit Google several times a day, but do you know how often Google visits you? There are ways to find out. Google offers a free tool that will not only tell you when it last "crawled" your website, but what pages it looked at and any errors that were found along the way. Google Webmaster Tools are a great way to find out what your site looks like to a search engine. They can help identify problems, learn what search phrases are being used to find your site and which ones actually result in clicks from the results page.

This valuable information can help you adjust the wording of text on your site and fix errors that could prevent search engines from indexing your content and giving your site a better ranking. Webmaster Tools can also show what sites are linking to and from your own. Google considers the value of a site that links to yours when it's determining the value of your content, so it is important to monitor those and try to collect links from valuable sites. These considerations are some of the basic elements of search engine optimization.

Another great feature of Google Webmaster Tools is Sitemap creation and submission. Not to be confused with the "site maps" you view in a Web browser, Google Sitemaps are special XML files that describe your site to search engines. Essentially, they allow you to give advice to Google about how your content should be treated. You can say how often a particular page changes (daily, weekly, monthly) and describe the relative importance of different pages. For example, you might prefer that someone searching for the name of your CEO should land on his official biography in your "About Us" section rather than a press release from three years ago, even if the press release mentions his name more often. Google Sitemaps allow you to give such instructions. They also allow you to specifically list pages on your site that might be hard for Gooogle to find by looking at links.

Webmaster Tools also allow you to verify the structure of your robots.txt file, which is another specially-formatted file giving instructions to search engines. This file has the opposite purpose of a Sitemap -- it exists to tell the spider what parts of your site should not be indexed. Google Webmaster Tools can make sure your robots.txt file properly follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

See the quick start guide that Google provides for more in-depth coverage of the available tools. If you find that your site needs some changes to be more accessible to search engines, drop us a line at support (at) cws (dot) net.