New Google Webmaster Tools Interface

Google has just updated its webmaster tools interface. It provides some updated functionality and a new look and feel.

Key new features include:

• a dashboard (with most of what you need to know on the one page)
• more top search results (up from 20 to 100) to show you which of your pages are displayed in the top results for visitors and which people click through.

Pet peeves include:

• it doesn't currently list all the links to a website that are shown in the old interface (ie you can't see every site that links to you)
  
• it would be great if it send notifications if there was something wrong with your site automatically before someone else noticed it - eg if some error had developed on your site or worse someone had put malware on the site. The public benefit from the later would be enormous.
  

You can see a brief video of the new interface below or if you use Google Webmaster tools you can log into the new interface directly at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/new. Shortly the old interface will be phased out.

Webmaster Tools - Summary Page

	Author: Google Site: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ Features: Check broken links Upload a Sitemap Check in bound links/pages not found Set/Check crawl frequency Top Search Queries Tools - enhance 404 pages, Gadgets, robots.txt
	Author: Yahoo Site: Yahoo Site Explorer Features: See other people's site links (pages and inbound links) See how Yahoo views your site
	Author: Microsoft Site: Live Search - Webmaster Center Features: Check inbound/outbound links Upload a Sitemap Check links/pages not found See last time Microsoft's crawler visited your site Check which pages on your site rank above others for keywords

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More on Google Webmaster Tools

I touched briefly before on how Google WebMaster Tools can be used to help monitor the success of your web optimisation efforts. Below is another form of analysis you can perform on your search queries.

Here are our Google Webmaster Tools search results from August:

A few points of clarification: Google Webmaster Tools differentiates the two columns on the Top Search Queries page as follows:

	Top search queries (Impressions) This table shows you the top 20 queries (by volume) that return your site, as well as the percentage of the top 20 searches each query represents. These are the search queries your site appears in. Note that this table just lists the queries that returned your site in the results; it doesn't indicate whether anybody actually clicked through to your site.
	Top clicked queries (Traffic) These are the top 20 queries from which users actually clicked a link to your site, as well as the percentage of the top 20 searches each query represents. These are the searches for which your site was one of the most compelling results.

The differences between the tables can offer you insight into how users are actually accessing your site versus how often your site appears in the results. If a query appears in the second list, it's a sign that not only does your content perform well for the relevant keywords, but that it's also relevant and appealing to users.

How can you use this information? 

If the Impressions list doesn't display relevant queries, consider adding relevant, targeted content to your site. Think about the words users might use to search. 

If a site appears in the Impressions list, but not the Traffic list, consider how you might improve your content including your meta descriptions to make it more compelling and relevant for searchers.

Bonus: Both tables show the highest position a page on your website ranked for that query. You can further filter your results using Search Type (eg Web Search or Image Search or both) and Location (eg Google US, Google Australia etc).

Examining our results

In our case we ranked quite highly for most terms in our top 20 impression list, however few of these terms translated into traffic apart from the doctor's names themselves. Also the traffic coming through to the site was predominantly from complex search terms involving 3 or more words.

Over time we have added more content and focused on obvious terms that generate a lot of impressions but were not generating traffic for us such as the words "gynaecologist" (in this case 44% of impressions) and "gynaecologist melbourne".  

Be careful to ensure you are performing this analysis on a reasonable volume of website traffic or the results can be misleading. For example with our data "melbourne gynecologist obstretician" generated 16% of traffic. It is hard to imagine that more than one person would make this misspelling! The obvious conclusion is there weren't many visitors in August arriving from Google search.

Summary

The Impressions table is the list of the top 20 terms for which a page on your website appeared in Google's search results.  The Traffic table is a a list of the terms in the top 20 that people actually searched for and clicked to your site. These are powerful tools to help you understand customer behaviour. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent tool provided by Yahoo for Yahoo search.

Measuring success of your web optimisation efforts

Measuring the success of all your efforts is incredibly important - how do you justify putting time and money into your website if you can't see you are making a difference? Are your changes helping or harming your website performance?

There are two main measures I like to track:

1. the number of visitors to the site over time - the most direct measure of how successful you have been in driving traffic to you website. The image shows several months of monitoring on the OGCG website after we installed tracking on the website.
   

2. the position of keywords in the main search engines - an indirect measure of how effective you are in attracting search traffic to your website. Remember that although search will drive a large number of visitors to your site you can also drive people to your site through directories, through word of mouth, newsletters etc. For example in the case of OGCG we have a rough 70/15/15 split of traffic between search engines, directories and direct entry to the site.

As you progress in sophistication you can monitor other metrics that are more direct measures of success - such as perhaps the number of people visiting your contact details page or making an online booking. This allows you to close the loop on your marketing campaign and measure the real return on investment (ROI) on your website optimisation activities.

There are some very neat tools to help you look at just those issues.

Monitoring visitors to your website

1. Google Analytics - Being a bit of a Google nut I typically use Google Analytics for this purpose. There are some benefits to this including it is relatively easy to use, the tool integrates with Google Adwords and Search and it is free - of course they'd really love your Google advertising business if you could get it. Google Analytics relies on you inserting a piece of code on each of your web pages so that Google is sent a message each time that page is visited. The images on this page are screenshots from Google Analytics.

2. Website log monitoring - Your hosting company might provide you with a facility for inspecting and viewing which pages have been visited on your website. Typically they include some kind of analysis tool such as Analog, Webalizer or AWStats. These may be activated automatically for you by your hosting company or you may have to contact them. Read the documentation on their site about web hosting and their "statistics" packages.

3. Other tools - there are many other tools out there you can use. Some rely on you locating your web hosting log and others rely on the same method as Google Analytics - ie putting a piece of code in the pages you want to track. Examples include Stat Counter, Site Tracker and Omniture.

Position of Keywords in search engines

Even before you start optimisation you should have an idea whether you can be found on the search engines you are targeting and are important to you for the main terms you believe people will use when trying to find content you provide on your website. There are three methods I have found to find this out:

1. Manual method - clearly the cheapest but the most time consuming. This involves you typing in the Keywords yourself and seeing where you rank. You'll need to keep a record if you want to see what improvements have occurred over time. The manual method has the benefit that you can see what other results come up - maybe one of your main competitors or clearly irrelevant stuff which often means your site is very poorly optimised for the Keyword.

2. Google WebMaster Tools - Google Webmaster tools is another Google service that amongst other things helpfully tells you the most common terms people search for to access your website and your listing position for those terms. Once signed up see Statistics "Top Search Terms". This isn't quite the same thing as measuring your position against keywords service but perhaps it is even more useful telling you what people really search for to find you. This of course only covers Google search results but when it represents 88% of what users use perhaps this isn't a big deal. You can use Google Webmaster tools to perform many other useful Google related tasks.

3. Programs and Tools - I still haven't found a great tool to use regularly that keeps a record of my keyword position over time. At the moment the best I have found is Rank Tracker. I have been too cheap to buy it though so I probably haven't scratched the surface of what it can do. A few words of warning - there seem to be a lot of free tools out there that rely on you have a Google API Key - which you can't get and Google seem to have discontinued. They just won't work! The second warning is that many use the US site searches that may not be used by your potential clientele in Australia.

If you have any tips of your own on how to monitor these two fundamental areas I'd be interested in hearing them.