Google Webmaster Tools

The second key tool for effective website management is Google’s free Webmaster Tools. This tool compliments your company’s Google Analytics account. https://google.com/webmasters/tools/. Where Analytics gives you data and stats on visitors to your site, Webmaster Tools goes inside your website and evaluates how your site is set up structurally and how it is operating. Webmaster Tools provides diagnostic statistics on website factors including: server errors, search appearance, duplicate content, links to your site, crawl errors, and other factors that are critical when monitoring the health of your website because these items directly impact (positively or negatively) search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization, the process of maximizing a website’s organic (non-paid) visibility and ranking on search engines, is not just about using industry related key search words (Chicago same-day courier, New York courier, Los Angeles delivery service, etc.), but also about understanding and managing the unseen factors within your website. Every page on your site has code, tags and titles which search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) access to render your page in search results. Webmaster Tools includes statistics relating to Googlebot’s crawl of your website: how many pages Google has crawled on your site, how many pages are in your sitemap and how many have been indexed by Google.

Why are these statistics important to a courier company website manager? The factors that are “under the hood” on your site play a critical role in how your website performs on searches. With no changes to content or design, monitoring and correcting unseen factors such as inbound inks, unfound pages, crawl errors, duplicate titles and descriptions (which Google doesn’t like) can have a huge impact on where your website ranks on searches for your company’s products and services.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog is an online resource providing an abundance of information on what is changing in Google’s search algorithm, as well as what happens if your site is penalized by Google, and new features being introduced in Search. https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

#3 – 10 on our top 10 list to follow soon.
1. Google Analytics
2. Google Webmaster Tools (and Google Webmaster Central Blog)
3. Incapsula
4. LivePerson
5. Amazon Web Services
6. Braintree Payments – Vault
7. Woopra
8. MOZ
9. New Relic
10. TechSmith – Camtasia, Snagit