Blog Tips – Using Google WebMaster Tools to Enhance Your Site or Blog

What does Google think about your blog?

The Webmaster tools provide blogger’s with excellent information about how your site is viewed within the Google search engine. When initially building your blog or  company web site, it is important to make use of the wonderful and free tools that Google provides.

Top search queries

The continuous evaluation of statistical data called “top search” queries  can provide information to tune your site in order to meet your goals. This information is exactly what it seems and the title says it all.  It is worth evaluating on at least a weekly basis to ensure that that the key words connected to your site are relevant to yourtheme and topic.

For example, “medium highfade” is a search term that comes up with in my top queries and is listed as number one position at least 7% of the time. I’m not real sure what “medium highfade” is, or why anybody would search for that but I don’t believe it is really relevant to my site, since highfade.com dedicated to blogging topics .

Reviewing the Google webmaster guidelines can provide useful insights on how to better manage your site within the terms that Google defines and evaluate your title, description and content.

Site Maps

Generally speaking, I am fairly lazy (alternately called efficient) and if there’s an easy way to get something done, particularly when it comes to Web management, Then I will do it. Having a site map is important It helps outside search engines gain insights regarding the content and structure of your blog or web site.  I use Arne Brachhold’s XML-Sitemap plug-in for WordPress to automate the sitemap generation. THis is an excellent tool and we should all be grateful for his work.  Google has this to say about site maps:

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

1. Your site has dynamic content. (blogs typically do as they are frequently updated)
2. Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
3. Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
4. Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

Summary

In my last post I discussed the five steps you need to get started blogging. This post is the first in a series about Google and ongoing information for improving your blog site. I would invite you to comment on these articles in terms of their usefulness or lack thereof. I am completely open to your input!