Chapter 32
SEO: Diagnostic Tools
What SEO strategies have you missed? What mistakes have you made?
Well, you might ask, if you overlooked an opportunity, how would you know? If you missed something, you missed it. How can you possibly know what tactics you forgot about? The good news is there are plenty of diagnostic tools on the Internet that can help you identify problems or missed opportunities on your website. This chapter introduces three of my favorites. None of them cost any money and they each offer tremendous insights to evaluate and improve your website.
Google Webmaster Tools
www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Like so many other services, Google offers the webmaster tools platform free of charge. The platform has an impressive series of tools you can use to diagnose and fine-tune your website. But before you can do anything, you need to verify that it is, in fact, your website. Don't worry. The verification process is easy. Full instructions are provided. Once verified, you can see any errors the Google spiders experienced when crawling your website. You can also see when Google visited your site last and how many pages they crawled and/or indexed.
One important setting you can specify on the webmaster tools platform is your preferred domain format. In case you didn't know, the “www” at the beginning of most domain names is actually optional. You don't need to include the “www.” But the fact that it's optional creates a potential problem. Let's assume your website has ...
