The Art of SEO

Using Search-Engine-Supplied SEO Tools

All three major search engines make an active effort to communicate with webmasters and publishers and provide some very useful tools for SEO professionals.

Search Engine Webmaster Tools

Although we have referred to the Webmaster Tools provided by Google and Bing throughout the book, it is worth going into these in greater depth. Using Webmaster Tools is a great way to see how the search engines perceive your site.

First, let’s clear up a popular misconception. Setting up and using a Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools account provides no new information about your site to the search engines. That is not the purpose of these tools.

You can easily get comfortable with this when you learn how the tools are set up. You can create a Webmaster Tools account with either Google or Bing quite easily. An important part of creating these accounts is verifying your ownership of the site. To do that you have two options:

• Place a search-engine-supplied meta tag on the home page of your domain.

• Place a special file as specified by the search engine in the root directory of your web server.

Neither of these actions changes or enhances the search engine’s ability to access information about your website.

The intent of these tools is to provide publishers with data on how the search engines view their sites. This is incredibly valuable data that publishers can use to diagnose site problems. We recommend that all publishers leverage both of these tools on ...