My colleague Hannah released a blog post last week regarding the update to the ‘search queries’ section in webmaster tools. After playing around with the new tool we found that the information can be somewhat misleading.

We used the ‘search queries’ information for our own Creare Communications SEO website to reference the information provided against what we new to be fact.

The data provides a break down of CTR for organic search queries, this weeks tutorial shows how to find the tool and how to understand information provided.

Thanks for watching.

Webmaster tools is an essential tool when optimising or administrating a website for a client. The Google tool provides a range of comprehensive information.

Google have introduced new ways of verifying your website in webmaster tools, these include DNS, Meta tags, HTML files and Analytic accounts.

Tutorial

Thanks for watching this weeks SEO video blog, please leave any questions or comments on the supporting blog post.

1.) Preparing your website.

The first thing that you should do is ensure Google is aware that your site exists, you can do this by submitting your URL http://www.google.com/addurl.html, Then you need to help Google find all your content, Submitting your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools is quick and easy and helps towards all of your pages being indexed. You can generate a sitemap by using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

2.)Design and Content

You should ensure you site can be found from internal linking, Google states that every page must be reachable from a static text link, This can be done via a sitemap in the footer of your template. Offer a sitemap page which links to every page within your site, Google will also look for something named sitemap.html or similar.

Create quality content that reflects what you are trying to optimise for, you cannot perform well in any search engine if you key phrases are not mentioned within the site. Use HTML formats to emphasis your key words.

Check for broken links and make the usability as easy as possible. Domain URL’s should be as search engine friendly as possible and DB queries do not perform as well as static html extensions. i.e. services.html.

Keep links to a minimum, Google states that less than a 100 is reasonable.

3.) Technical Guidelines

Make sure your site is as readable for the search engine spider as possible, you can use Lynx to see what your site looks like to a search engine. This is worth doing if you have frames, cookies, fancy functionality such as flash and javascript.

Make use of the robots.txt to tell Google’s spider which pages, directories and content it should or should not index. You can find more information about this here: http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html.

Test your site in multiple browsers so that your site is accessible to wide range of users.

4.) Quality Control

Do’s:

Make pages for users and not search engines, write copy naturally, not for search engine optimisation and do not cloak any information. Avoid link building schemes to increase your PR, build links honestly through link baiting and social networks.

Don’ts:

Avoid hiding text or links, do not cloak or use re-directs. Don’t use software to query Google and don’t create pages that are irrelevant to your main content. Avoid duplicate content, meaning don not create multiple sites or sub domains with the same content on.