Googles tools for web designers

Posted by on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 5:04 pm.

Unlike some other search engines, Google are heavily investing time and resource in helping webmasters and web designers fine tune and promote their websites. One of the most significant things about all of these resources made available by Google, are that they are FREE! Some of the most popular common resources that are available at the moment are:
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Google’s Webmaster Tools
Google’s Website Analytics
Google’s Local Business Centre

Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google’s webmaster tools (previously known as ‘Google Sitemaps’) has recently been updated with a series of new and advanced analysis tools for webmasters. Web Designers can verify their site within a free Google Account and then monitor and edit the settings of their website within Google’s records. The clear and easy to use dashboard allows webmasters to set their web-site’s crawl rate, check PageRank distribution and also provides a series of error feeds to help you iron out 404′s, dead links and problems within your website.

Google have also upgraded their ‘incoming links’ data to allow you to study your web-sites incoming and outgoing links in more detail. Google’s WMT’s also highlight HTML recommendations, showing you pages that they believe have short or duplicate titles.

The Google Webmaster Tools are a must for all webmasters and website designers, as it allows you to see what Google thinks of your website and helps you ensure that you do not have any major errors or problems with your company’s or your client’s website.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (abbreviated GA) is another comprehensive, free service provided by Google that has been available to the masses since August 2006. Again with a Google Account, a user can subscribe and install the analytics on their website for no charge and with minimal fuss or disruption. The installation of the analytics is a simple ‘Copy & Paste’ of some Javascript that sits above the </body> tag on every page of your website.

The Google’s Analytics platform is incredibly powerful and rivals, if not surpasses many other statistic packages that are available to purchase. GA’s features include the ability to track visits from all sources including Google, all other search engines, PPC (Pay Per Click), websites and even email marketing. The Google Analytics package also effortlessly integrates with Google Adwords, allowing marketers and developers to keep a close eye on a web-site’s performance with particular referrers.

Google Local Business Centre

Again, available through a free Google Account, The Google Local Business Centre (LBC) is another tool provided by Google to allow the public to edit and maintain the commercial data that is contained with the ginormous Google Maps system. Prior to the Google LBC, Google sourced its’ business data in the UK from Yell.com’s databases. Google have since overhauled this dependency and have uploaded the majority of UK business onto Google Maps.

The Google LBC tool allows webmasters and business owners to add, edit and maintain their business profile on Google Maps. After a simple telephone or mail verification process, you can quite simply ‘claim’ a business listing that is on the system and edit the data thereafter. After verification, you then have the ability to:

Edit and edit simple business data such as Company Name, Address and telephone numbers
Add website and email addresses
Uploaded images and videos related to your business and premises
Change and move the marker location on Google Maps
Add further information such as opening times

The Google LBC is another important part of Google’s impressive and free website tools.

It is important to ensure that your business’ or client’s websites are maximised across this ‘free help!’ that has been proved by Google who choose to work with webmasters rather than elude and battle with them.

One Response to This Blog Post

kronikmedia
on July 27th, 2009 Says:

Google web master tools is a must for all SEO and web design professionals. They have recently improved their interface and offer a range of useful tools. I use it almost daily to track the performance of my sites. I have seen a big improvement in my overall ranking after I have been following the recommendations.