So last time I posted I wrote about how Jasmine Star’s site was hacked and that could have been easily avoided by registering with the search engines. However, registering with the engines isn’t just a fail safe for possibility your site will be targeted. There are actually a bevvy of tools in there (as some of you may have noticed) which can help you in a whole bunch of other ways.

Webmaster tools was developed by Google to help sites not only give information, but to get information they won’t provide to just any old person. Namely, what they see of your site, what your site actually ranks for and and where you’re getting all your traffic from. For this one, we’ll take a look at the webmaster tools for my site indelibemind.com (NOTE: I use this as my own personal testing ground and occasionally a way to either update my family or demonstrate a technique. It is by no means any good at this point, so don’t expect to run over there and learn all the SEO secrets. )

Okay, here’s what my (only recently verified) site looks like in Webmaster Tools.

This is the Dashboard and will tell you pretty much what each of the drill down’s go over in more detail.

First look at the “Top Search Queries”. These are words people search on Google that they then click through to your site. Woo hoo! Check it out! I’ve got a first page ranking! Actually, I’ve got 10!!! But wait. First of all, it’s for a Disney movie… is that really what I want to be ranking for? Second, I spelled it wrong. Drat. It’s “spoonful” not “spoon full”, any idiot knows that. Hopefully yours says something like “awesome photographer” or “colorado photographer” or maybe even the coveted “denver wedding photographer”. Either way, this is what Google sees about your site. Those are the keywords your ranking for and are getting traffic. If you want to know the most prominent keywords on your site (regardless of traffic), just click “Your site on the web” followed by “Keywords”. Pretty cool, huh?

But the coolness doesn’t end there. Everyone knows that SEO is two parts. First, it’s your ste’s content or “on page” optimization. But, second, it’s links. You want powerful sites pointing to yours as a reference. So just below that you can see all the sites linking to mine. None. Dang it! (I told you my site was no good). However, this is a great way to keep track of how valuable other people see you site. Do a lot of people link to you? No one? Why? How can you increase that either way? These are the fundamentals of SEO and now you can see exactly how Google perceives you.

Lastly, let’s look at the right hand side under “Crawl Errors” and “Site Maps”. If you’ll allow me to be a total web geek for a moment this is the most important part! The reason is, no matter how many links you’ve got or how awesomely helpful your content is, you won’t rank if Google can’t read it. You’ll see, I have no crawl errors. However, my site map isn’t working. The first is good, the second is bad. Now I know what I’ll spend my weekend doing.

Of course, each of the drill down areas on the left has more information on the topics, so explore it a bit and learn more in depth about your site in the eyes of the almighty Google.

Bonus Points: While I make a joke about spelling that Mary Poppins song wrong, notice I’m not alone. People are searching for it and clicking on my site for help. More importantly, I’m ranking with a site that SUCKS. What misspellings could you rank for? Can you help people get what they want? Check out my post on Mary Poppins and see how I handle the misspelling issue without discrediting myself. “Becher Mansion Wedding” anyone?