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See How the Search Engines See Your Website

Jay

If you own and run a website, there are two tools that you should consider using. These tools help you know how the search engines, notably Google and Yahoo see your website.

The best things about these tools are that:
1. It’s Free – All you need is a Google account and Yahoo account in order to gain access.
2. Created by the two biggest search engines – Google and Yahoo.

Google Webmaster Tools is pretty easy to implement on your website. All you need to do is insert a meta tag into your index page or upload a text file to your site, which is used to verify that you are the owner of the website. This is the first step before Google can even reveal any information. Once your site is verified you will be able to see a lot of information, which will ultimately help you make your website more “Google search friendly.” GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) will show you broken links and errors and even statistics. If you wonder how people are getting to your site when they are searching on Google, you’ll find the answer here too. Other things you can see in GWT are Links, Sitemaps and Tools. For a more detailed summary about each one, you can go to Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Yahoo Site Explorer is the same idea as Google Webmaster Tools but you can only view Yahoo Search statistics. You can find the sites and subpages that are indexed by Yahoo Search as well as find pages that link to that site or page. When you authenticate the site, you can also view more detailed information about those sites and subpages. For further analysis, you can even export Site Explorer data to view in a spreadsheet format. To view a more detailed summary about what Yahoo Site Explorer offers you can go to their Resource Area.