Geekwidget

Google Webmaster Help Group – Have questions or feedback on our guide? Let us know
Google Webmaster Central Blog – Frequent posts by Googlers on how to improve your website
Google Webmaster Help Center – Filled with in-depth documentation on webmaster-related issues
Google Webmaster Tools – Optimize how Google interacts with your website
Google Webmaster Guidelines – Design, content, technical, and quality guidelines from Google
Google Analytics – Find the source of your visitors, what they’re viewing, and benchmark changes
Google Website Optimizer – Run experiments on your pages to see what will work and what won’t
Tips on Hiring an SEO – If you don’t want to go at it alone, these tips should help you choose an SEO company

Take Advantage of Web Analytics Services

If you’ve improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Webmasters Tools or other services, you’re probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. You can use these to:

• get insight into how users reach and behave on your site
• discover the most popular content on your site
• measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site (e.g. did changing those title and description meta tags improve traffic from search engines?)

For advanced users, the information an analytics package provides, combined with data from your server log files, can provide even more comprehensive information about how visitors are interacting with your documents (such as additional keywords that searchers might use to find your site).

Lastly, Google offers another tool called Google Website Optimizer that allows you to run experiments to find what on-page changes will produce the best conversion rates with visitors. This, in combination with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools (see our video on using the “Google Trifecta“), is a powerful way to begin improving your site.

Make Use of Free Webmaster Tools

Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google’s Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site. Using Webmaster Tools won’t help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results. With the service, webmasters can:

• see which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
• upload an XML Sitemap file
• analyze and generate robots.txt files
• remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
• specify the preferred domain
• identify issues with title and description meta tags
• understand the top searches used to reach a site
• get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
• remove unwanted sitelinks that Google may use in results
• receive notification of quality guideline violations and file for a site reconsideration

Yahoo! (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and Microsoft (Live Search Webmaster Tools) also offer free tools for webmasters.