Webmaster Tools Insights:
- Create an XML Sitemap using one of the free sitemap generators. Without a sitemap, Google and Bing could take weeks to find and start to crawl your website. Crawling and indexing are important steps to your website appearing in search results and enabling internal site search.
- Submit your sitemap.xml file to Google and Bing for indexing, using webmaster tools. Maintain the integrity of search results by removing obsolete page URLs and cached pages.
- Create a Robots.txt file to restrict the search engine robots from crawling your website.
- Create a custom Error 404
Not Found
page to handle and track visitors' attempts to access a non-existent page on your website. Include the Custom Error 404 Page Not Found Widget to help visitors find relevant pages on your website.
- Review your web logs. HTTP status codes other than 200 and 304 might indicate trouble.
- Add a 301 permanent redirect to your web server to maintain a single copy of each webpage in a search engine index. The most common example is www.mydomain.com versus mydomain.com. Using a search engine friendly, permanent redirect also ensures the Referral string arrives uncorrupted in the Clickstream data.
- Add a canonical link in the <head> element of a duplicate page, a link that points to the original page:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/original.html" />.
- Track the load time of your website using the Site Performance feature in Google Webmaster Tools. View a Site Performance Report. Visit the High Performance Design page if your average load time exceeds 1.5 seconds.
Webmaster Tools Resources:
