Google Webmaster Center, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center
If you want to boost your SEO and design sites that stand out from your competition, check out the following easy-to-use webmaster resources.
Google Webmaster Center
Check out Google Webmaster Tools: The following features make it easy for developers to design or build entire sites.
Before you begin, you must sign up for a Google account. Google offers a one stop shop for webmasters (at no cost!). This one-stop hub teaches you all the tricks and tools you need to build dynamic sites that are SEO effective: keyword searches, subscriber stats, etc. Google basically explains the basics for you and makes it VERY easy to follow.
o Webmaster Guidelines – You should start with the Webmaster Guidelines first. It is important to read and follow Google’s guidelines according to their specifications. These guidelines help Google index and rank your site. Please read the “Quality Guidelines” carefully because it details SEO penalties and the reasons why Google removes sites from its index.
o Design and content guidelines: details step by step how you should design your site, content, etc. (ie “Make sure your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate”).
o Technical Guidelines: Google provides details on robot.txt files and advises testing sites to make sure they work well in different web browsers, etc.
o Quality Guidelines – These guidelines give you the specific pros and cons when it comes to GOOD SEO practices – stay away from black hat techniques like cloaking. Do not duplicate content, etc.
o Webmaster Checklist: Google makes it easy for you to check off each step as you go through the design process. It also makes sure that it is up to date with the best SEO practices, according to Google’s criteria.
The Google Help Forum and Webmaster Help Center/FAQs make it easy to quickly find answers to common SEO and web development issues/questions.
yahoo! website explorer
yahoo! Site Explorer is a free and easily accessible tool that allows you to search all sites/pages indexed by Yahoo. To access Yahoo! Site Explorer, you must first create a Yahoo account.
The best feature of SEO is that you can easily research competitor sites (a great way to find your competitor’s links and link to your competitor’s sites).
Submit a URL and see how many pages and internal links are listed. Click the “explore” button for each site and learn more about each page/link.
The Site Explorer APIs are also a great resource tool for web developers (especially when it comes to their SEO). You must request an App ID to use this service (click on the right side of the page to get started).
The Site Explorer APIs allow you to track the traffic and usage of sites on Yahoo. Provide the following data:
o Inlinks and page data
o Ping and Update Notifications – You can notify Yahoo of changes to your site
Bing Webmaster Center
Microsoft has joined Bing Webmaster Central. Webmaster Tools allow you to research crawling and indexing and view statistics on Bing. It also identifies other sites that link to your site and submit XML sitemaps.
You must sign up for an MSN account and then sign in to Webmaster Central. Before you can use your Webmaster Tools, first sign up and authenticate to your sites. Webmasters have access to a full blog, forum and help section if they have more questions.
Webmaster Tools features the following resources to help you improve your SEO on Bing:
o Robots.txt validator
or Check HTTP
o Keyword research
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