Web Blog of Greg Mathews

Google provide a very useful tool in the form of Webmaster Tools which allows you to track how your site is doing in the Google search results.

Google describe the tools as

Our suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site’s visibility.

You will need to get a Google account to use the Webmaster tools, if you already have a gmail account then you can use that. You will need to verify your site which simply involves either uploading a file to your server with a specific file name or adding a ‘verify’ meta tag to your sites home page.

Once verified you can obtain all sorts of information such as whether or not your site is in Google’s index, when your home page was last crawled by Googlebot and even the top keyword searches that found your site in the results.

I have been able to use this valuable information for all sorts of things since I started using it.