SEO Class for Web Developers: Google's Search Engine Optimization Tools

[juanmorris]

In our previous tutorials we've discussed the foundations of SEO, and you've learned the latest SEO techniques. This week we'll show you some of the best SEO tools you can use to enhance your SEO rankings.
Google Webmaster Tools
As we mentioned previously, if you haven't used Google's Webmaster Tools, that's a great place to start. Webmaster Tools provides you with a number of resources that you really can't afford to live without. The first thing you'll need to do is to create a Google account (if you don't already have one). Then you sign up for Webmaster Tools--which will require you to add a small bit of code to the header of your web pages (all the pages that you want Google to track). This allows Google to validate that you own the site in question, and facilitates the tracking of your pages.

Once you have your account, and have added the Google tracking code, you will be presented with the data accumulated from your site. The information that is provided includes:

* Top search queries - Information about user search queries that have returned pages from your site.
* Crawl errors - Issues Google encountered when crawling your site.
* Links to your site - External links to your site
* keywords - The most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. These should reflect the subject matter of your site.
* sitemaps - Sitemaps are used to tell Google about pages on your site they might not otherwise discover.
* Internal links - Pages linked to by other pages on your site.
* Crawl stats - Googlebot activity in the last 90 days
* HTML suggestions - When Googlebot crawls your site, it commonly finds some issues with your content. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help your site's user experience and performance.
* Malware details - If Google discovers any malware on your site, they will be displayed here.
* Site performance - This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users.
* Fetch as Googlebot - With Fetch as Googlebot you can see exactly how a page appears to Google.

[kris]

Thanks for sharing usefull message juanmorris's