After you have taken some basic steps to improve your search engine rankings, you can start monitoring how search engines are spidering your site. One tool that you can use is Google’s Web Master Tools. Similar to Google Analytics and Local Business Center, Google Web Master Tools is a free service and it is simple to set up. After you complete the form online, you will be asked to upload a file to the root directory of your web site with a specific file name. You do not need to have anything in the file, just have a blank file with that name specified by google. This is just to verify that you are indeed the web site owner/master. After you upload the file and complete the process online, you will be given access to some tracking data about how google is crawling and indexing your site.
Information that is contained in this tool are:
- The last time a Googlebot successfully accessed your homepage
- The list of pages indexed on your site
- Pages from other sites that link to your site
- A snapshot of your page when Google lasted accessed it
- Page rank of your site
- Keywords found in your site
You can use this tool to get a better understanding for what Google is finding on your site.
