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?

When you look for a web hosting company, they will usually promote the amount of space, bandwidth and their web hosting uptime. Most companies offer a guaranteed uptime to show off their service reliability.

Web hosting uptime is a measurement of the time a server has been running. Uptime is important to not only the hosting companies but to anyone who has a website. The availability of your website is a major concern. What if a potential buyer just read a great article linking to your site, clicked on the link and found an unavailable site? You lose sales. The cost of the downtime can amount to hundreds of dollars.

Most of the web hosting providers offer 99,9% uptime. What this 99,9% uptime means to you? For a 30 day month it means less than 1 hour when your site is unavailable. Please understand that no web hosting company can have a 100% uptime guarantee. Always look for 99,9%, 99,99% or 99,999% uptime and read (and save a copy of) their terms carefully. Can your web hosting provider give back the losses their downtime caused?

If your website experiences downtime, contact the customer service department to ask when your site will be back. If downtimes occur too many times, look for a different company with a higher uptime.

Can you imagine your site is down while there are many customers, potential buyers ready to purchase any product or service from your site? If you are not sitting in front of your computer 24 hours a day (I suppose you need some sleep), how do you notice your site experiences downtime?

That’s simple. Keep monitoring your website or server by using an uptime monitoring service. One of the monitoring services is Web Service Guard.

Let me tell you what they can do for you:

• Web Service Guard let you know when your site is unavailable for any reason. You receive real time alerts so you can fix the problem or contact the support immediately.
• There is no software to install, they can monitor any website. Web Service Guard provides independent third party monitoring services.
• Unlike other monitoring services which have keep the monitoring statistics for 30 days, Web Service Guard stores and provides details of outages for a full year.
• WebServiceGuard tracks and logs all event failures and generates historical uptime metrics. These system uptime metrics are available 24 hours a day.

You can keep monitoring your website uptime for free. Get rid off the lost online sales and low conversion rate caused by downtime and claim your free membership now!