SEO Warrior

Chapter 7. Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

This chapter is divided into two parts. First we’ll cover Google Webmaster Tools. The Google Webmaster Tools platform gives webmasters an easy way to track their web page traffic, analyze their robots.txt file, add their Sitemap files, and so forth. It would be foolish not to utilize Webmaster Tools, as it is an indispensable resource for conducting SEO.

The second part of the chapter covers the Google Analytics platform. Google Analytics is the preferred marketing tool for viewing general web stats and, more importantly, conversions. Both of these are great tools, and best of all, they are free. Both of these tools should become part of your SEO toolkit.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a good resource for webmasters. With it you can easily spot all kinds of problems. The following subsections explore Google Webmaster Tools in detail.

Webmaster Tools Setup

Just as you do when using any other Google tool, you need to register for a Google account before you can use Google Webmaster Tools. If you already have a Google account, sign in at http://google.com/webmasters/tools/. Once you are signed in, you will want to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools. Before you can add your site, Google will ask you to prove that the site in question is truly yours. Figure 7-1 shows the two methods you can use to validate your site.

The default method is to use the HTML meta tag. The second way is to upload a text file with the ...