In today’s age, users do not have the time or the patience to go through thousands of search results. More than 90% of Internet users do not browse beyond the top 15 sites. In such a scenario, visibility and search engine optimization are crucial if you want to pull in maximum visitor traffic to your site. In such a case, Google’s Webmaster tools help you do just that and much more!

Google provides one of the best Webmaster tools available online. These tools offer a free and an easy way to make your site more Google-friendly and search engine optimized. “Google Webmaster tools” have great scope to help you in efficiently handling all aspects of website management and making your site search engine friendly. To take an example, keyword suggestion tool helps you in identifying keywords relevant to your business. Another tool like site analytics software helps you track online visitors to your site. This tool can provide information about the channel through which these visitors find you, if they are turning into customers and also give data on prospective leads on your site.

Broadly, these tools provide updated information about any problems on your web pages; the number of pages contained in your index and a detailed compilation of every page on the Internet that links to your pages. Using this tool, you can identify the reason why your pages rank high or low for search words and phrases. Optimal use of Webmaster tools is the only way you can achieve

search engine optimization

and a sure shot technique to stay way ahead of competition.

Another valuable tool is Sitemaps. A Sitemap is a list of pages on your website. By creating and submitting a Sitemap, you provide Google information about your site, including URLs which Google’s normal crawling process may not be able to discover. The Sitemap tells Google about the important pages of your website and how often you change them. This tool helps Google crawl your pages smarter and enables you to see what is going on the minds of Google searchers. To take an example, you can see what queries and keywords people use when they find your site. You will know whether people find you for the keywords you have been targeting or not. This way you can optimize your content.

Google Sitemaps is a simple way in which you can enhance your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that allows you to communicate directly with Google. The Sitemaps protocol allows a web master to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. By submitting sitemaps to a search engine, a web master is assisting that engine’s crawlers to crawl more intelligently and do a better job. Having a Google Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have latest and up-to-date information. To build your sitemap online in four easy steps, check the link http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.

Google Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps are an excellent way to take better control of your website management. You would no longer be passively submitting your site; but would also monitor and edit it. As explained earlier, with the help of these advanced tools, you can improve online traffic to your site, enhance your site’s functionality and grow your business opportunities.

In forex affiliate marketing, in general you often need to give your affiliate marketing efforts a push. If you are an affiliate promoting forex, you need to move beyond the usual banners and text links. This is where forex webmaster tools come into play in order to give your efforts that much needed push.
Why forex webmaster tools?
Simply because they engage the audience/site traffic and also help in influencing the prospective visitor to convert to a forex trader. We take a brief look into the most widely available forex webmaster tools which are easy for you to implement.
Live Currency Rates: This is usually a flash or a java module with an easy to use cut and paste code to get it working on your website. This graphic tool is a good way to offer the present currency rates in real-time. You can choose between the currency pairs you wish to keep a tab on or think is relevant to the market/region you are promoting to. The chart looks great, especially when the rates change and does it’s bit to not only keep the visitor occupied but also help in forex trader conversions.
Currency Charts: There are many of these available. The candlestick charts are one of the most popular type of analysis and forex traders would often be interested in this module. The currency chart however isn’t a tool to attract new forex traders but is more targeted towards the seasoned trader and gives you a good opportunity to influence the visitor to switching to a different forex trading platform.

Live Indices: The live index is a very informative tool that helps you to keep tab on the world indices and gives a brief insight into the trading patterns. This is again often helpful to convert both new and seasoned forex traders.
Currency Convertor: One of the most basic interactive tool that one could get for their website, dealing with forex trading. Although given how common this tool is available, you won’t get much leverage by having this module on your website but at times it helps the visitor stay on your site.
Most forex webmaster programs offer such tools for you to promote. We recommend the following forex webmaster programs that gives the forex webmaster the option to use such interactive tools.
•    eToro: Virtual Salesperson, Traders Challenge leaderboard, Currency Pairs, Market News, Popular Trade, Forex Charts and Economic Calendar.
•    Affiliateyard: Quotes/Charts, Economic Calendars
•    ReferForex: Live Currency rates, Pivot Calculator.

Google has made Webmaster Tools Message Center more accessible by making it possible to forward messages to the owners Google account. it is known to everybody that the Webmaster Tools’ Center communicate private and confidential information about your sites that you have verified. This information can be related to high profile and secret topics and issues about your website. Details about potential issues with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, or any confirmation actions taken within Webmaster Tools Center can also be there.

Now if you want to have this feature in your site then enable this feature just update your settings on the Home page. You can forward these messages in any of the 40 languages which are supported by Google Webmasters Tools to any email associated with your account. If you want to link another email address to your account then click on My Account available at the top of the page and verify the new address. Since all emails will be sent through, update your spam filters to ensure you don’t miss these emails.

Now we are giving the list of the 40 languages. Last November Google had released Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide to help webmasters improve their website’s performance. To make it accessible to the international users Google had been adding localized versions to it. The recent release of guide in 40 languages is just a simple step in that direction. More than 98% of the global Internet audiences are expected to benefit. Now, webmasters across the globe can use the SEO starter guide to improve their website’s indexing and crawl ability in search engines.

Search Engine Starter Guide is now available in the following languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, traditional Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

It has been reported that Google is now sending notifications to webmasters after reviewing a reconsideration request submitted via Google Webmaster Tool. It is really a major step for Google to reconsider the request made to it by several webmasters time to time. Handling all these things is not so easy. Earlier a webmaster would submit his request and he would not have any idea about the matter whether Google would review it or not. In certain cases, the site would appear in the Google index, on other occasions, nothing would happen to it for months. They were quite blank about the matter that they were confused over the fact that if they were supposed to clean up his website more or if Google had yet to review the site for reconsideration.

Google has decided that they will send a conformation email to those webmasters informing them that they have submitted a reconsideration request and Google is reviewing that. It is possible that the email will be sent days after the request has been made and will begin with the subject line We have processed your reconsideration request for [websitename.com]. But after getting this email notification if you do not find your site on the search engine then it would be probable that your website is likely in violation.

If you are looking for a quick and easy way to develop more original text for your Website or for any online publishing purpose, no doubt that “Create Content For Webmasters” Tool can get you there. Successful WebMarketing is eventually about continuously adding fresh-unique-text for your Site(s). Learn about this innovative technique and how it is about to bring you a lot more incoming traffic.

Basic introduction

What an advanced “Create Content For Webmasters” Tool does is asking the user for a key phrase, it then starts researching and analyzing topic-related Websites for relevant sentences and sentence parts and collects them into an internal database. Not only it collects that information for you, but even organizes it into different subgroups based on specific subtopics. In order to complete the job all you have to do is to start constructing entire paragraphs that come together into a perfect, readable new article(s).

Advantages

This program quickly brings immediate and clear benefits:

* Enables you to prepare continuous Newsletters at almost zero effort.
* You can write on any topic even if writing isn’t your strength or passion.
* Helps you on keeping your visitors come back to your Site by constantly updating it with new and interesting information.
* Develop free contents about any topic you choose.
* Helps on keeping the attention of your visitors and the search engines.

Final words

Well, if we summarize it we can say that “Create Content For Webmasters” Tool enables you to virtually get endless amount of WebContent. Now that you know more about how it works it is advised to try it by yourself so you can immediately enjoy the wide range of benefits that it offers. There are plenty other benefits provided by this important webmarketing technique simply because it is a powerful webmarketing solution that provides so many opportunities for beginner and experienced webmarketers.

You’ve spent hours upon hours building and tweaking your website until you’re finally proud and satisfied to show it off to the world. You check daily for the traffic of visitors to wander through, and praise all your hard work. Days go by, and still only a couple of people have checked anything out – what’s happening?!?
Well, chances are that nobody really knows your site is online. While it’s true that the search engines may eventually stumble upon your site if it finds a link on another webpage somewhere online, you’ll likely be indexed so low in the listing that very few people will find you. Let’s fix your problem using the huge arsenal of Webmaster Tools you may have missed the first time around. We’ll break down all the tools into three categories: SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Site Link Submissions, and Tracking systems.

SEO TOOLS
Though you’ll be tempted to send a link for your site into the search engines (SE) right away, don’t do it! Yes the search engines will accept adding your website to their long waiting list, but you’ll be standing way at the back of the line if you don’t prepare your pages properly first.
Search Engines will actually give a higher priority to accepting pages that have already done some of the work for them. The first Webmaster Tool to check into is the Meta Tag Generator. Hopefully you’ve given each page a short “Title” (which will appear at the top of the browser when people look at your page), but we definitely want to include at least two more Meta tag code types on each individual webpage.

Description
Include a short description about what’s on that specific webpage. This is the description which will appear under the link for your site when it’s listed in the search engines. Think of this as your classified advertisement – you want the description to attract enough interest that users will check out your site.
Do not fill the space with random hype. The SE will give a much higher relevancy score when the description matches phrases from your actual content. Get rid of as many filler words (the, and, of) as possible for the best results.

Keywords
These are the main words you want the SE to consider when listing your site. Don’t list every word you “want”, and DO NOT include words that aren’t actually in your content. The search engines may include you temporarily, but they will drop you just as quickly when they realize you’ve added words that aren’t even in your webpage.
Rather than listing single words, concentrate on specific phrases (of 2 to 4 words each) that appear in your webpage. Many people make the mistake of listing every word or phrase they can think of or want, but the engines generally only consider the first 20. Focus on the main phrases in your keyword list: the search engines will find the rest on their own. Separate the words/phrases with a comma. If you need help picking out some of your best keyword choices for that page, use the Keyword Density webmaster tool. It will help pinpoint some of your best options.
You can add in other fields as you want, but the generator only really needs the number of days for the SE to revisit. Just enter 7 days (even if the page changes daily) for normal pages, or 365 days for pages that won’t be changing for a year. The search engines assign their own revisit schedule, so setting the days lower than 7 to try fooling the SE is foolish.

SUBMITTING YOUR WEBSITE
You could set up a webmaster account with each of the main search engines, but the Simple Submission tool will take care of getting your website included in the queue with just one button. It may take a while before the search engines actually check out your website (there are almost a million new sites added to the internet each month), so use the submission tool to make sure the main SE know you exist.

TRACKING SYSTEMS
Welcome to the most useful (and most overlooked) devices to pinpoint exactly how your website is succeeding, and where it’s failing! To save yourself hours of time and frustration, use the Pages Indexed tool as your number one guidance to see if the search engines have started indexing your website. You could go to each SE in turn, and try entering the name of your site, but unless it appears on the first or second page, you could spend hours looking for it (if it is even listed yet). The pages indexed will not only let you know which SE have picked up your site, but also which specific pages it has included in its listings.
Want to find out how your keywords or target phrases are doing with the Big-Three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), then do it all in one step using the Position Checker. It will tell you right away how close you are to the top of each SE. If the results show you’re way down in the listings, this will be the perfect time to re-optimize your page and keywords for better phrase choices that can get you to a higher ranking position.
Are you getting slaughtered or not showing up for important phrases? Then it’s time to spy on your neighbor – which, in this case, is your competitor. Uses the Competitor Analysis to see how they are getting the keyword listings you want. Tweak your site a bit, and you may quickly overtake them.

MORE TO EXPLORE
There are so many fantastic tools available, and each serves its own specialized purpose. Make use of every Webmaster Tool available to build your ranking score … and check out the Crazy Egg tool – it’s probably one of the hottest tools you’ll ever find!

The importance of creating a Sitemap as part of your search engine marketing strategy and its effectiveness for you search engine optimisation efforts. One of the tools that allow you to upload and submit your sitemap is Google Webmaster. However, the importance and the benefits of using Google Webmaster Tool as part of your online marketing strategy are not limited to this.

Google Webmaster Tools is a free web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimise visibility of their websites. Also, it is a great tool for reporting statistics and diagnosing your website’s performance in Google.

The Benefits of Using Google Webmaster for Search engine marketing:

As search engine optimisation consultants we have compiled a list of task which can be performed using Google webmaster panel on regular basis. These tasks would help in doing heath check of your site as well as for creating you search engine marketing strategies.

1. Google webmaster login gives you relevant information on indexing of your site. It gives you access to all information from the last time Googlebot accessed your homepage to error reports regarding your URLs.

2. It allows XML Search Engine Submission of Sitemap. Google Webmaster allows submission of an XML sitemap to help Google index your deeper site pages and pages that are more difficult to find or may not yet be indexed.  Once submitted, you have the option of seeing when it was last downloaded by Google and how many URLs you have submitted via your sitemap.

3. It provides you with diagnostic data about your site. After you log in to Webmaster, you have the option to click on the “Diagnostics” Tab and have a look over the information provided there and take actions accordingly.

4. It gives you statistics about your site. Google Webmaster gives you access to see your top search queries, top clicked search queries and information about the Page Rank distribution of your site page. You can create search engine marketing strategies based on the information you get from here.

5. It provides you with valuable insights into the anchor text of links coming to your site. From the “Statistics” tab you can click on “What Googlebot sees”.  This is a very useful section for examining the anchor text of what people are using to link to your site pages. This is another important sections which helps you in building important search engine marketing strategies.

6. It gives detailed information regarding your external link inventory. If you click on the tab “Pages with external links” you will gain access to the site pages which have a low number of external links and need improvement. This is very important in checking how effective is your link building campaign and how many keyword rich links are pointing to your relevant pages. As a part of search engine marketing strategy, seo consultant would always look for this section on regular basis.

7. It allows generating / analysing robots.txt. Google Webmaster gives you the option to create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don’t want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don’t want crawled.  Also, you can analyse them and see if it respects the modifications you made.

8. It allows you to set a preferred domain. Therefore, you can set a preferred domain that will be associated with this site. For example, you can choose to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.

9. It gives you the option of setting geographical targets. Webmaster Tools allows you to associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area. In todays time when there are millions of website competing with each other, local search engine marketing is very important. In this section we can point Google bots to rank us high in the areas we are looking to promote for our website.

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google to help new and experienced webmaster check on their indexing and raise the visibility of their website(s). Among the tools in Google Webmaster are those that check the crawl rate, list sites linking to the user’s site, determine what keyword searches on Google bring the user’s site into the search engine results pages (SERPs), determine click-through rates of SERP listings, show statistics on how Google indexes the user’s site, create a robots.txt file and submit sitemaps.

The range of tools offered on Google Webmaster Tools can help webmasters significantly raise their profile by search engine optimization (SEO), and traffic generation. To make Google Webmaster Tools work with your particular site, you have to install a snippet of code into your site. Google Webmaster Tools make a great partner to Google Website Optimizer as far as getting your website as prominent as possible.

If, for example, your site has a page in which you offer your visitor some free report or software in exchange for their email address, you could use the Google Website Optimizer to test two versions of that page to see which one converts best. This lets you streamline your SEO efforts and cuts back on some of the trial and error part of it.

Google Webmaster tools was launched in 2006 to help webmasters create sites that are friendlier to search engines. There is also the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program. It lets domain hosts use Google’s application programming interface (API) to get their customers up and running with Google Webmaster Tools.

There are many steps you can take to help Google find, rank, and index your site. They can be classified as Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be complicated when you don’t know the right way to use this feature for directing traffic to your website. There are many tools available, yet considering Google is the search engine used more frequently, the information will be regarding the aspects of the tools used within Google.

The benefit of using Google Webmaster Tools helps website owners the in the ability to generate larger amounts of traffic to their website. Google Webmaster Tools is a free service for internet users. There is an extremely large amount of information available to you after you have verified your website with Google.

Here are some of the features of Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools will show you all the errors on your site, which this process includes showing any broken links on the website and all the links driving the internet traffic to the website where there might not be a valid page. The tools also include telling the site owner of possible restrictions they may have placed on the site that will limit access to the site visitors.

There is the ability to set the geographic target of the site such as if you want the www. to appear on the listing of the site. You can select if you want to show images within Google when the search has been performed by internet users. This process is called Google Image Labeler.

Google Webmaster Tools will provide a list of URLs that have duplicate title tags or meta description. The information will let you know if the pages are too short or too long. This helps to correct any problems with the website and lowers the traffic flow.

Top search queries are shown with the Google Webmaster Tools. It provides information regarding what the webs searches are and how the internet users are seeking information on the internet. This information helps to increase the flow of traffic to the website. The provided information breaks down the results by web, image and country.

Managing the site links for your website is very important. Most people desire to have additional information listed in the search results with their website. Google Webmaster Tools provide the option of setting the information you want listed under your website in the search results. You can only let Google know if you don’t want a site link listed, and you are not able to tell them what pages to add.

Google will provide a bit of JavaScript about your site on a 404 error page that will offer your site as an option for the internet user seeking certain information. This is a great way to direct traffic to your site.

Using Google Webmaster Tools helps to promote higher traffic flow to your website. It is a free service you cannot afford to pass up when wanting to generate higher hits on your website.

When you set up your blog or website it is incredibly foolish not to register your site with Google Webmaster tools. It provides you with  a lot of valuable information about your site such as the number of backlinks to your various posts/pages.

It also tells you about problem pages for the Google robot as to which pages could not be found, what is restricted by robots text and so on. But recently I found a very useful trick that I have been employing to very good effect.

If you look at the top left of the page for analysis of a particular site you will see a table of “top search queries”. Unlike the stats in your Awstats program in cPanel, these queries show the key phrases and their ranking or position according to the Google robot.

The first important point about this is that you will see that your site might be found or ranked for a search term that you had not targeted. This affords you the opportunity to provide content based around that particular term, which will obviously be mentioned somewhere on your site but not focussed on, to boost your rankings and rank for that particular key phrase.

It is incredible to study this table and see phrases or keywords on your site which were written naturally into a post or page and to see them ranking in the top 20 in Google. Now the trick to which I referred above is as follows:
Click on the “more” link at the bottom of this “top searches queries” table and this will expand the list to maybe 20 key words.

Scan through this list and see what phrases are ranking on page 2 of Google, in other words are top 20, and then check out the number of searches for that keyword. Make sure that there is a decent number of searches for that phrase but once you are satisfied that there is, write a post/page based around that key phrase and write some articles targeting that post.

Without too much effort you should be able to nudge your position from page 2 of Google to page 1..all for a word that you may never have considered or targeted.
Next time, check your webmaster account and check out that table because you would not know what little gem you will find.

And remember you are not trying to get a keyword from page 15 or 20 onto page 1; you only need to shove it from page 2 which should be very realisable with a little bit of judicious article marketing.

I came across a strange problem while I was reviewing webmaster tools. I signed in with my google account and started reviewing my settings. I chose the website I validated before and clicked Site configuration>Crawler access respectively.

In the Test robots.txt tab, I saw interesting errors that was saying:

Line1:  ?User-agent: *              Syntax not understood
Line2:  Sitemap: Valid Sitemap reference detected
Line3:                                        No user-agent specified

I checked my robots.txt file again and again. There was no question mark in Line1 of the robots.txt file which google claims there is.

I create a new robots.txt file by using notepad in Vista Home Premium operating system and uploaded this new file into my production server. I waited for about a day and checked again. The same error was still there.

I Googled for this and found a link which was talking about exactly the same issue I was having. After creating my new robots.txt file by using ANSI encoding type and checking it from this link problem solved. Well at least seems like that. I have been checking Google and it is still showing me the same error. I think it is going to take some time to reflect new changes.

This is the link I found the solution for this specific problem: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=28d012e70d5fcdc8&hl=en

This is the link of the web site which gave me the opportunity to check my robots.txt file: http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/cgi-bin/check-url.pl

You can find the related blog entry in the following link as well. http://www.yasarmurat.com/Blog/19/syntax-not-understood-error-for-robots-txt-file-in-google-webmaster-tools.aspx

Have a great day.

-Update:

After waiting some time the change happened as it is expected.