Help Google to help your company website
Posted 24 April 2007 at 8:38AM by Simon Dickson in Managing your website
I wrote earlier this week about Google's market share - nearly 80% of all UK searches, and still rising year on year. So if your business has a website, there are few things more important than ensuring all is well between it and Google.
Google has a number of 'webmaster tools' in its Webmaster Central area, which will help you to diagnose any problems, and fine-tune your site accordingly. If your website isn't showing up at all, or if you don't think Google has visited your site in a while, there's a straightforward site status wizard: just type in the site URL, and Google will tell you if its pages are being indexed, and when it last checked.
There are more fabulous tools available, including the ability to see which searches tended to uncover pages from your website, which searches led to clicks though to your site, and your site's average position in the results for a given search term. You'll also be able to carry out some administrative tasks, including advising Google on when to check your site for new material, or to remove certain pages from its archive.
It's all free of charge: but to prove you're the rightful owner of the website in question, Google requires you to either add some code to your homepage, or to upload a dummy file to a predefined location on your website's server. Neither of these is especially difficult, but if you're a complete novice when it comes to building websites, you might want to ask someone for help. There might also be problems if you're using an automated or hosted service to build your website; you won't be able to verify your ownership without direct access to the server or page code.
(One word of advice: you'll see references on the Google pages to 'Sitemaps'. These are pretty complicated XML files, used by huge websites to guide Google round their pages. Don't confuse them with the the 'sitemaps' you might use whilst clicking round a website.)
Tags: google, search engine optimisation, search engine ranking
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