Search Engine Webmaster Tools

While you are in the pursuit of more visitors to your website, it’s important to use the free tools provided by the “big 3″ search engines to aid you in your quest for top organic search result appearances.

Google provides it’s Webmaster Tools which provide a reasonable amount of helpful information for site owners.  You’re able to submit sitemaps, view indexed keywords Googlebot finds in your pages, view inbound and internal links, test your robots.txt file, view any crawl errors, see which keywords your website has shown up for, and a few other less useful tools.

Yahoo provides a tool called Site Explorer which provides some basic functionality to webmasters.  Mainly, it allows you to submit a sitemap to give Yahoo’s spider a helpful hint as to the pages on your website.  It also allows you to remove pages from the index.  Outside of that, it doesn’t do much and it’s not the easiest interface to use.

Bing provides a set of tools called Webmaster Tools that allow you to do some basic functions.  You can submit sitemaps, test a keyword against your indexed pages, and view crawl errors by the MSN Bot.  The interface is very basic, and doesn’t provide much functionality outside that.

Overall, it’s a must to be familiar and use these three tools from the Search engines that dominate 99% of all searches on the internet.  By far, we prefer Google’s tool, and after all, they were the first to provide such a tool.  The main thing you want to accomplish with all three is getting them information about your sitemap xml file that they can use to continually spider your website and you need to make sure that you keep it updated as the contents of your website change.