If you have a website, register with Google Webmaster Central. This is possibly one of the best investments you can make to get your site noticed and to increase traffic to it. Webmaster allows you to collect a lot of valuable information about how a given site ranks when it comes up as a search result on Google. Google is the ideal company to offer a service like this. Google, after all, is the site whose name changed from a noun to a verb when its huge network and quick results made it the go-to search engine for most of the world.

Google Webmaster does not cost anything; you simply need to get a Google account before you can sign in to Webmaster. The website you plan to work with on webmaster may be from any domain you wish. Many large publishers utilize the Google webmaster tools to help adjust the content on their websites. You already have a Google account if you use Gmail or Blogger.

Go to www.google.com/webmaster/, sign in and you will find yourself at the Google webmaster dashboard. From here, you may take advantage of a range of tools that allow you to work with Google from your computer to make your site more visible on Google searches. Google has provided all the necessary tools to get started with this, including inside looks at how Google indexes sites so as to maximize the advantage you have by using Google Webmaster.

First, you will learn how Google’s robot (Googlebot) crawls through the web and indexes sites. You will learn how often Googlebot checks your site for new content, and you will learn whether Googlebot is able to access all areas of your site. Webmaster helps you find out if Googlebot has had problems with this, and offers tools to correct problems that may exist. Webmaster offers file validation that allows you to test out changes made to your site before actually making the changes on your server. Webmaster also allows you to see which words attract the most business to your site and see what words other sites use to link to it. Webmaster allows you to track which search terms are driving the most traffic to your site and how much of your pages are indexed. With Webmaster, you will see where you need to push content and which terms to use to optimize your website’s performance.

In addition to helping you gather search data, Google Webmaster offers a sitemap protocol that allows you to submit your sitemap to Google for referencing on its index. This supplements the crawl mechanism of the Googlebot and allows you to have your site as thoroughly indexed as possible. When you have a page within your site that does not link to any of the other pages, a sitemap is a virtual necessity if you want to drive any traffic at all. After all, it will only be accessible via search engine result, and the sitemap protocol will make the listing of those sites as comprehensive as possible.

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