I know that today in our series you were expecting to hear about Google’s keyword tool.  Unfortunately, the old keyword tool has made way for a new and not necessarily better one.   The Flash for the new tool is not even working for me.  So we will not be exploring this.  If the website is actually working, feel free to look at the keywords.  But you may also want to augment with another keyword tool. 

You can still see what keywords are being used to find you website (Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools) and which words are considered to be the most important on your website (Webmaster Tools).  Hopefully we will do a future post once we have explored some other keyword tools.

So for today we will be looking at the Google Toolbar.  It has many features but we are looking at the PageRank.  It gives a number from 1-10 on the importance of the page you are viewing, 10 being the highest. 

So our example is the Etsy.com main page. If you hover over the PageRank button, it tells you “PageRank is Google’s view of the importance of this page (7/10)”.

The OFFICIAL rank of the page is derived from a complicated algorithm, but this is the fast and easy version for you to compare.

It also has a drop down menu from the PageRank button that gives you quick links to “Cached Snapshot of the Page” , “Similar Pages”, and “Backward Links”.

So how does this help your website?
If you keep tabs on the rank of your page, you can see slowly and long-term how your website changes and marketing are building the importance of your page. It also gives a quick link to a search of linking pages and similar pages. That can also help you keep tabs on your progress. If a “similar page” is not anything at all similar to what you are trying to achieve, maybe you need some more tweaking.

Now if you website does not have a 10/10 ranking, please don’t worry.  Some of the websites that we frequent and seems fairly popular have ratings from 4-7.   Low ranking does not mean you are unseen and getting your ranking up,  just like SEO, takes time.  Be patient.  You have made many SEO changes and are marketing like mad, give it 6 months to a year of steady work.  If you still haven’t seen improvement in your rank, it may be time to start a new strategy.  Waiting is hard but such things take time and hard work.  And sometimes a stroke of good luck when it comes to marketing.  So just keep it up!

Adding PageRank to the Toolbar
PageRank is an enhanced feature on the Google Toolbar. So to add it, click on the wrench icon on the right of the toolbar.

This screen will show up. Choose the “General” tab and the PageRank options are under “Enhanced Features” section.

So now we have reached the end of our tour of Google tools. Hopefully, you have found some helpful information for optimizing your website to be exactly what you always hoped for. Stay tuned for future posts on other website tools and tips. Good Luck!

Jargon in this post: keyword, PageRank, SEO

Hopefully everyone has had good luck in using the SEO Guide and Analytics so far. The topic today is Webmaster Tools. This is different from Analytics because it tells you what is going on behind the scenes of your website rather than how people are looking at your website.

How this information helps your website:

• Search Queries. Shows the keyword searches that bring up your site in a search engine. This can help you assess the effectiveness of the keywords you are using. If you see a few different search variations of a phrase (such as searches for red maple, red maple tree, and red maple leaf), you may be able to target that phrase in some way. You can also see the % change as your site moves up and down the search results. It can help you see how consumer trends are changing or if there has been a sudden influx of competition.
• Keywords. This subject is just everywhere! Webmaster Tools will give you keywords found on your site and significance (how often it is found on your site). So ideally, the content you want to target (ex: Oregon nature photography) should have keywords at the top of that list. The top keyword should not be something like “continue” which people are not so excited about. **NOTE: The time it takes for Webmaster Tools to update Keywords is variable so be patient. Or explore some other keyword tools if you are not patient.
• Diagnostics. These can be VERY helpful. It will show malware attacks on your site, page crawl errors, and give HTML suggestions. You certainly do not want to be passing malware onto your visitors. If you are, your site may be excluded from search results. So this is a great way to be aware. The HTML suggestions help with some of the SEO that was discussed in the SEO guide such as duplicate title tags, meta tag problems, etc. Also pay attention to the speed your website takes to load under the crawl details. You don’t want large images or something like that slowing you down too much.
• Sitemaps. They were talked about in the SEO guide so with Webmaster Tools you can create and submit one for your site.

There are lots of help boxes to help you explore more about these tools so feel free to dig deeper in how to use Webmaster Tools. But here is the instructions for adding your site to get your started.

Add a Site
Click the “Add a Site” button on the Webmaster tools dashboard. Type in your website address (ex: www.simpleaspen.com). Now you have to verify that you are actually the webmaster of this website. You can verify by adding a DNS record, adding a new meta tag, uploading an html file, or by linking to a Google Analytics account. Adding an analytics account is the easiest because Google will verify it for you.

Google treats www.simpleaspen.com and simpleaspen.com as different sites. So you may want to add both. You might also want to set one as your preferred domain (the one that will be used for search results). Select the site you want to use as your preferred domain. In the left toolbar, click “Site Configuration” “Settings”. Then choose your preferred domain settings.

Blogger sites can also be added to by enabling Webmaster Tools through the Blogger dashboard. Scroll to the bottom where is says “Other stuff”. It will be found in the Tools and Resources section.

Jargon in this post: keyword, sitemap, meta tag, html, crawl

Other posts in this series:
Google Tools to Help your Website – Overview
Google Tools to Help your Website – SEO Guide
Google Tools to Help your Website – Analytics