Google offers a variety of free tools to webmasters that provide an easy way to make sure your sites are Google-friendly. The Google webmaster tools, as they are called, offer you the ability to see exactly how Google views your site. They also offer you the opportunity to diagnose problems with your site and to provide Google with information that could help improve your site’s visibility.

he Google tools allow you to learn a variety of things. You can find out when the Google bot last crawled your site, if the bot had any problems crawling your site and what words others use to link to your site. You can get a large amount of information on how your site is indexed within Google. To use these files, your site must be verified by Google. The verification process is done through the use of a Google file that is placed in the root directory of your site. You can also use add a META tag with a unique value to your site's home page. Google recommends this solution if you are using a blogging application that doesn’t give you access to the root directory. You have to create a Google account, if you don’t have one (if you are using adsense, Gmail or Orkut you already have one), and then sign up for the Google Webmasters Tool. Once you are into that account, you can add your blog or blogs, select verification and get the META tag Google gives to you.

’m not going to walk you through all of the tools in the webmaster toolset. You can look through and view the tools for yourself. The tools I am going to walk through are the Indexing tools visible if you click on Statistics and then Index stats.
After adding all of the required information to your site’s root or the META tags, you can use these commands in Google to view your site information:

info
    info:YourSitename.com and/or info:www.YourSiteName.com

This allows you to see all of the pages that link to your site’s front page. This is one of the most     useful tools Google offers. When you use this in the Google search box, you will see a list of other links that will lead you to additional information. The 5 links that typing info:YourSiteName.com     can also be typed directly into the search box as well. Take a look at the screen shot below.

cache
    cache:YourSiteName.com and/or cache:www.YourSiteName.com

This shows you the page that Google has cached for your site

site
    site:YourSiteName.com and/or site:www.YourSiteName.com
This tells you which pages of your site have been indexed

link   
    link:YourSitename.com and/or link:www.YourSiteName.com

This is supposed to allow you to see all of the pages that link to your site’s front page. I have to say that I found this particular item inaccurate because there are sites that I KNOW for a fact have linked to www.PureBlogic.com. Those links didn’t show up when I did the search, however, they do     show up in the Find web pages that contain the term www.pureblogic.com (see the screenshot above). I have to investigate this particular feature a little more to find out why the links that should show up don’t. For instance, here is a link that Caroline Middlebrook created to PureBlogic. I can see it in the Google index, however, this link doesn’t show up when I use the link keyword.     Here is the link so you can see that I’m telling the truth :-)                                                   http://twitter.com/cmiddlebrook/statuses/524459952.

There are plenty of others that don’t show up as well.

related
    related:YourSiteName.com and/or related:www.YourSiteName.com

This shows the pages that Google has determined are similar to your site. This does not always return what one would expect. It is better to type in info:YourSiteName.com and/or info:www.YourSiteName.com and use the links provided on that page.

The tools that Google provides are free so take some time and make the most of them. Look at how Google sees your site. If there are errors or issues with how Google sees your site, you should take corrective action. I’m not saying that you should spend your days worrying about how Google sees your site, however, for those of you out there that intend to try and conquer the Google keyword thing, using these tools will be very, very beneficial for you. For the rest of you, just knowing how you fit into the Google world is great information. Happy Googling People!

Visit the Google Webmaster Tool Center here!

Posted By Kila Morton

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