Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [35]
The page not found report will report broken links on your site. As the search engine is following links to old pages or to newly added pages, sometimes the links within your site may not publish properly. Sometimes this is also human error, usually by mistyping a URL when managing pages on the website. Checking the page not found report daily or weekly will notify you of linking issues as they happen, rather than waiting until there is a problem and diagnosing afterward. Although most errors are simple programming issues, there are cases when this report can be your best tool. Seasoned web marketers understand that there are many things that can happen, even with the best managed websites. Mistyping URLs in links, creating a nonfriendly URL, not formatting page links properly, moving pages (which causes the URL to change), or deleting old product pages are all typical activities that can “break” links. So, it’s best to be proactive and check the status of the broken link report every week or every month, depending upon your level of activity with the website. If you are adding content and articles a few times a day or more, then check the broken link report actively. If you rarely update your website or add content, then it won’t be as necessary to use this report as often.
Crawl Stats
Crawl stats allow you to see how often Googlebot, the name of Google’s spider, visits your site and downloads new versions of your pages. Many website managers are surprised to see that Google actually visits their websites multiple times throughout a day and potentially thousands of times during a month.
The process of “submitting your website” to a search engine and waiting a month for inclusion or for changes to be picked up is long gone. Many times I have seen changes to a website show up within hours in the Google results. My, how things have changed.
If Google is not crawling your website, then there are a few issues at hand. The primary diagnosis would be that your website does not have any incoming links from reputable websites. That is primarily how the search engines find new websites, and it is a primary key in the frequency of Googlebot’s visits. Popular sites are spidered more frequently.
If your website is being crawled but not many pages are being updated or downloaded, then I would compare that to the number of pages indexed by the search engine. If only a small number of pages are indexed, then there may be programming issues preventing the Googlebot from moving forward.
Note: Just because your site is spidered by the search engines and has been downloaded into the search engine’s server (index) does not mean that your site will automatically rank well. There are many other factors that affect rankings. Getting your site spidered and indexed is just the beginning of this process.
Search Queries
The Search Queries tab in Google Webmaster Tools gives you an excellent idea of the visibility of your website (see Figure 4-4). This report shows the keywords where your website has appeared in the search results (Query) on the left. In the middle (Impressions) is the number of times your website has appeared to the searchers for the specific keyword. The next column (Clicks) shows the number of click-throughs your listing attracted for that keyword. Click-though rate (CTR) means the percentage of clicks compared to impressions. The far-right column shows the average position of the keyword in the search results.
Figure 4-4: The Search Queries tab in Google Webmaster Tools
The Search Queries tab can help you diagnose your current situation and provide a seasoned SEO professional with a task list. By organizing the report based on Avg. Position or by CTR, you can see the words that rank the highest and compare them to the click-through rate. Evaluate this against the title and snippet of the results and the surrounding snippets, and you can see what the searcher sees. This will help you determine whether your title or snippet can be better written and optimized to provide a better description of your website in order