Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for you. Your website’s visibility can be improved in Google’s search results with its help. It informs webmasters about how Google is interacting with their website. It’s free to use, just like Google Analytics.

The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. If you use other Google services, you can use the same login. If not, you can sign up for a free.

Once you add your sites (yepp, sites – you can add as many as you want) to the Dashboard, each site have to be verified. If you can’t verify your site, Google won’t be able to get an insight.

You can check how Google crawls and indexes your website, when your site was last crawled and which pages are already indexed by it.

The Overview page shows you how many errors Google noticed. You can check restricted and unreachable URLs and you can see the broken links which lead to 404 error pages. You also can find the referrer sites where these links are. I hope you feel how powerful it is – you can fix any problems that prevent Google from indexing your pages.

If you have broken links that are coming from inbound links, a 301 redirect can be setup on your site to fix the problem as soon as possible. It’s sometimes easier and quicker than trying to contact the referrer site to update the link.

Google displays restricted URLs as errors. Some pages are restricted by the robots.txt file for a reason (e.g. you don’t want your redirected affiliate link to get indexed or you want to prevent duplicate content) and you don’t need to fix them.

The Statistics page is where Google tells you how it sees your site, which top search queries drive traffic to your site, etc. Top search queries are phrases people looked for and Google displayed your site in the results. This is great information about how people are searching and how they’re finding your site. You can see phrases you never think of 

One of my favourite parts is the What Google sees area where you can understand what Google thinks of your site and how it see your content. This is where you can find the reason your site can’t rank well for certain keywords. You can view comprehensive data about your internal and external links to your site.

You can upload an XML sitemap to help Google crawl all of your pages and to learn which pages are the most important to your site. You can specify your preferred domain name. You can choose how you would like to see your domain name in Google’s search results.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource to see how Google is interacting with your site. You can learn more about the issues, the linking structure, the keywords people use. If you don’t know why your site doesn’t appear on the first page on Google, this tool might help you detect what is the problem.

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? Is it useful for you?

Most of the websites can be accessed by typing the domain name with www (like http://www.fatbanker.com) and without www (like http://fatbanker.com).

Try to avoid using both of them. Choose the one you prefer and stick with it because if you have a preferred domain and you promote this one, Google doesn’t have to give separate PageRank for URLs that point to the same site.

Opinions differ. Someone says use your domain with www because most people type URLs starting with it, others use it without www because it’s something like a subdomain. Choose whichever you think is best for you, just make sure you only use one format from the beginning.

Add a 301 redirect using mod_rewrite

Once you have selected your preferred domain, you can force everyone to use that domain. Simply add a 301 redirect with Apache’s mod_rewrite. It’s necessary to create or edit your existing .htaccess file. You will find it in your sites root folder – usually located in public_html folder.

If there is already an .htaccess file, create a backup.

Prefer your domain with www?

If you prefer to use www before your domain, you can copy and paste the following code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.fatbanker\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.fatbanker.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course you will need to replace fatbanker.com with your site URL. Now when your surfers access a URL like http://yourdomain.com they will be redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com. The above code redirects all yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com including directories and files. E.g. yourdomain.com/contact.html will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com/contact.html.

Prefer your domain without www?

If you want everyone visiting your website to do this without www in the URL, simply add the following lines to your .htaccess and upload it to your server:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]


The above code redirects all www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com.

Some hosting provider might not show the .htaccess file or have them in read only mode. In this case you can ask them to set the 301 redirect. They will help you.

If you mess up your current .htaccess settings, you may get a 500 server error code when you try to access your site. In this case just upload the previously backed up file.

Let Google know about your decision

It’s time to tell Google which domain format you want to see in the search results.

Login to your existing Google Webmaster Tools account (or register for free) and set your preferred (canonical) domain. Some days later you will see that all of your pages are displayed in the format you wanted to see in the search results.

It’s great, everyone uses your preferred format and you ensure linking consistence. Having 50 incoming links to the preferred domain will receive more weight than having 20 inbound links pointing to your site with www and 30 links without www in URL. In the second case you present Google with two pages.

Are you using your domain with or without www?

Last time when I was on my trip in Italy without an Internet connection I couldn’t publish posts on my blog. According to Google Analytics the number of my visitors dropped during these days.

A lot of blogs seem like every author sit behind the screen all day long to publish (4-5 posts) daily. They can post every day whenever they are. These bloggers never go away for vacation or if they do, are posting from the beach, from the shops or from the museums.

Or… Can they write posts and schedule them for later? Googling my question I found a post on JohnChow.com about WordPress’ timestamp feature.

WordPress timestamp is a great built in tool that can save you a lot of time – also can save your blog’s traffic when you are out for weeks. You can write a bunch of posts in advance and schedule them to be published in the future. You can use it to improve your productivity.

There are days when we are feeling inspired, have a lot of great ideas to post, your writing is really flowing – and there are days when you can come up with nothing. If you are starting your brainstorming session, write your posts and use the timestamp to post them later. You don’t need to worry about periods you have nothing to write about.

How it works?

• Write your post as normally
• Look for the “Publish” section on the right side and click on the “Edit” where it says “Publish immediately”
• Select the date and time you want your post to be published – you can use a date in the past too
• Click on the “OK” button
• If the date is in the future your “Publish” button will become to “Schedule”
• Hit the “Schedule” button – your post will be automatically published at the chosen time

Remember to publish the post. If you’re just saving it, WordPress will leave it as a draft. Once you press the publish button, your post will queue. When the time comes, your post will be automatically published.

How many times do you use this WordPress feature? How many of your posts have been timestamped?

Bounce rate is used in website traffic analysis to represent the percentage of visitors who come to your site and immediately leave without visiting any of the inside pages. Everyone wants this number to be as low as possible because we want our visitors to stay longer on our website.

How do you know what your bounce rate is? The simplest way is register for a free Google Analytics account, list your site and paste some HTML code on your pages. Analytics will you provide free in-depth reports.

Some web analytic software (just like Google Analytics) helps you to find out what bounce rate should be considered as normal. For static websites anything under 40% and for a blog or websites with lots of outbound links from 50% to 60% should be normal.

Is your bounce rate higher than it should be? I’ll show you 5 ways to lower it.

1. Provide good content
   Maybe the most important. Many of us put too much time and energy into the design of the site and not enough into writing effectively. Not giving the surfers what they are looking for is the best way to get them to leave your site immediately. Content is king!
2. Make sure your website loads quickly
   You have seconds to grab your visitors’ attention. It’s really important to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. Optimize your site – don’t use too many or heavy images or Flash. Choose a reliable host.
3. Make your pages easily available
   Keep your navigation simple, clean, easily readable and user-friendly. Make sure your site is easy to use and well-organized. If your visitors can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they will leave your site. Surfers are impatient. They need information right now.
   Make sure you use the same menu on the whole website and provide an easy way to get back to your home page. This might sound like a no-brainer, but many folks get it wrong.
4. Use internal links
   Give people internal links (links that are pointing to other pages of your website) that will lead them to other pages of your site. Make sure you are linking to other pages that are relevant to the page you are linking from.
   Using good anchor text will help you. Let your anchor texts grab your visitors’ interest and let them dive further into your content. Never use click here – nobody will see it.
5. Take note of traffic sources
   Where is the majority of your traffic coming from? Direct links, search engines, social networking sites? The quality of the traffic will contribute the overall bounce rate being higher or lower. The more targeted your traffic is, the lower your bounce rate. Focus on traffic source that convert better.

Bounce rate is an important measure of your website’s effectiveness. There are also people who believe it plays a role in how search engines rank your site. If it is true it gives you some extra motivation in working on improving it.

If your site has been loosing visitors as fast as they enter, it’s time to make the necessary modifications on your site and then give it a few weeks to see the difference. The difference should be that your visitors will be staying on your website for longer periods of time. Run tests to see if it improves over time.

Are you using Google Analytics? What is your bounce rate? Are you satisfied with it? Do you know how people interacting with your website?

Now you know how to get your website indexed within 24 hours. It’s time to let search engines know about the other pages. The more pages get picked up by them, the better.

How can you help them to spot your whole site? Here are 5 tips:

1. Make your pages accessible.
   Each and every page should have at least one link pointing to it. You can write great articles and you can provide interesting, unique contents – if there is no link, nobody will find it. Make sure your pages are easily accessible. Link from your homepage to the pages to get your entire website crawled faster.
2. Create a sitemap.
   You can create a sitemap that contains links to every page of your site. Place a link to your sitemap page from the homepage. This map can also help your visitors to get familiar with your site.
3. Avoid variables in the URLs.
   Search engines don’t like variables in URLs (like http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?var1=somevars&var2=854). It’s a fact. They don’t index all of this kind of pages if any. You can easily get rid of them with mod rewrite. You can also make your URLs search engine and user friendly.
4. Use internal links.
   The more ways search engines can find your pages, the better. If you’re blogging, you can always link back to your previous posts. It helps Google locate your post and bring more traffic to that post. Internal links can also reduce the number of visitors who leave your site immediately after reading your page. Use them to lower your bounce rate.
5. Get links to the deep pages.
   Everybody knows we need inbound or incoming links from other websites. If an incoming link is not pointing to the home page but another page that is deeper in your site, it helps search engines to discover that page.

   It’s the so called deep linking. When you build links for your site, try to get links that point to different pages and not just to your home page. Don’t forget to use good anchor texts when deep linking.

Google doesn’t index all of your pages (maybe 50-70% of it). The 5 tips above can help you increase the amount of the indexed ones. Always make sure the spiders can find your site from different places.

Let me know if any of the above helped you to increase the number of your pages listed in search engines. Do you know any other technique? Just leave a comment.

I received a $117 commission today from one of the visitors I sent from a 4 days old website. What is so great about it? Well, that I haven’t set up any PPC campaign. The buyer was coming from Google. Was I lucky?

I saw many of the website owners are complaining about their sites are not indexed on the first week/month. My sites are always listed on the major search engines within 24 hours…

Did you do anything to get indexed? Do you have any backlink that can be followed by search engines? You don’t need any special software. All you need is what you have – a PC/notebook, Internet access and 15 minutes.

Sounds pretty strange, huh?

So, you’ve built your website – uploaded to your server and now are waiting for traffic. You need traffic as soon as possible because your site has a lot of unique and precious content.

Here is what I’m doing to get listed on the SEs on the very first day: I’m using the power of social bookmarking/networking sites.

Social networking sites are one of the best ways to appear in the SEs. These sites are crawled every few minutes by Google and its friends. Whenever you submit your pages you get picked up by them within hours. I (and Google) really like the following ones:

Digg.com
Delicious.com
StumbleUpon.com
BlinkList.com
Propeller.com
ReddIt.com
Fark.com
Furl.com

Using the right keywords during submission can help you getting more targeted visitors. Submit your story/article with as many related tags as you can. Tags are used in these social bookmarking sites to categorize stories.

Don’t forget. The more backlinks you have, the quicker you get indexed by search engines because the bots have more leads to get at your site with. The more links you have, the more interesting your site must be. Because of this search engines allow you to climb higher in the search engine rankings.

Now, it’s easy to get indexed by Google and the others. The next step is to get a higher position in the search results for your keywords…

Do your sites get indexed faster with the help of the sites and technique above? Do you know any other method we should use to speed up the process or anything that can bring visitors from the first day? Let us know.