FREE tools from Google

Google isn't really in the search business, it's in the data business. Search just happens to be the company's most popular free product.

Many people don't know about the amazing wealth of free tools Google offers, though. After all, what good is data if it can't be accessed, searched, filtered, sorted, analyzed and used to some benefit?

Google benefits from the data in obvious ways via its far-reaching ad network. But the search firm has been incredibly smart with its data: It allows free access to sanitized sections of data via an ever-growing suite of tools.

These free tools help to further entrench Google, as well as allow the company to collect even more usage data from the users of the free tools. Free Web apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Blogger, Maps and Google Docs give the search giant a window into the usage patterns of billions of users.

Add to that its entry into telephony, television and the browser wars, and you start to understand the scope of Google's vision. It is collecting unimaginable amounts of usage data from the most critical communication channels, likely to expand its ad networks. Brilliant.

What's more, Google opens a few doors into its data goldmine to help online marketers earn — and reinvest — more money on their ad network, and create a better Internet experience for their users. Google's free tools allow the SEO everyman access to high-quality tools that you might think only major corporations could afford.

Depending on tools that draw solely from Google data does inherently skew the analysis and the recommendations. But with any tool you have to consider the source of the data as part of the analysis process. In SEO there is no single pure data source, so you may as well pull from the largest and freest, in addition to other trusted sources.

CORE SEO ANALYTICS TOOLS

Google Analytics and Google Keyword Tool stand head and shoulders above the rest of Google's free tools as foundational underpinnings to any SEO strategy. Think of it as the difference between understanding what you already have, and researching what you want to have.

Google Analytics offers a free and relatively easy-to-implement analytics solution with access to a key piece of SEO data — one that requires custom implementation in the major paid analytics packages: Entry Page URL. In addition to the usual visits, orders, sales, bounce rates and other online metrics, Google Analytics allows you to easily associate natural search visits and sales to the keyword and entry page.

Think about it: You don't optimize the whole site for a keyword phrase, you optimize a specific URL. You don't build links to an entire site; you build links (ideally) to specific pages targeting specific keyword phrases.

To determine if your SEO activities are successful, you have to do the analysis on the impact to the specific keyword and entry page URL. Google Analytics is also faster and easier to navigate than the other major analytics packages I've used.

While Google Analytics tells you what keyword phrases and URLs your site is and isn't performing for today, Google Keyword Tool offers a window into which keyword phrases would be most beneficial to perform for going forward.

Using analytics data as keyword research will only result in receiving more of what you already have. But basing optimization decisions on keyword data from Google Keyword Tool positions you to capture more traffic and sales for keyword phrases you're not winning today.

STRUCTURAL SEO TOOLS

The first pillar of SEO is optimizing a site's structure. Googlebot can't deliver content to its users that Googlebot can't crawl, so site architectures that prevent efficient crawling and indexing are detrimental to Google's goals.

To help Webmasters help themselves, Google provides a suite of Webmaster tools at Google Webmaster Central, a blog and a companion YouTube Webmaster Central Videos Channel. (See “Where to find it” on page 22.)

After site owners verify ownership of a site, Google offers Webmaster tools to:

• Manage crawl: XML sitemap submission and indexation rates, crawler error details, crawl stats, robots.txt tester, parameter handling

• Manage content and architecture: internal links report, meta data and title tag issues, various keyword relevance reports

• Manage domain: domain changes and preferences, geographic targeting

• Manage search result appearance: block sitelinks, rich snippets tester

These tools are useful to diagnose specific SEO issues, such as a sudden drop in product sales, or in specific instances like a domain move. You might not need them every day, but they're crucial to have in an emergency.

It's a good idea to review the other reports and tools monthly to make sure things are running smoothly. But analytics visits and sales data are the true measure of “running smoothly.”

One of the most useful of Google's free tools is actually Google Web Search itself. Stringing different advanced operators together in the search box returns detailed indexation information that can be used to uncover crawl barriers and indexation issues.

For example, if a site offers 4,000 product SKUs, there should be 4,000 product URLs available to index. Let's say that product URLs all contain an SKU number, like this: http://www.example.com/prod/sku-1234/cat-23/. Googling a query of site:www.example.com inurl:sku would reveal roughly how many and which product URLs Google has indexed.

SEO CONTENT TOOLS

Keep in mind that Google's results for these types of queries tend to be ballpark rather than pinpoint. A starter set of advanced operators can be found at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

Similar to Web search, advanced operators can be used in the Google Toolbar as well. In addition to offering a persistent search box in the browser's toolbar, the Google Toolbar provides access to the PageRank bar, the highlight option and shortcuts to many of Google's other free tools.

The PageRank bar changes to display the PR of the current Web page as the user surfs. While this visible indicator of PageRank is controversial based on its infrequent updates and intentional inaccuracies, it can provide a quick indication of the flow of link popularity through a site. Just don't bet the farm on its data.

The highlighter shades keywords on the page based on the word entered into the search box. It's a handy way to identify the frequency and phrasing of keywords on a page, and useful for presentations.

SEO LINK-BUILDING TOOLS

When a site is crawlable and indexable, the content on the pages is the next pillar of SEO. Content optimization centers on using the most popular, relevant keywords in the most prominent, crawlable areas of a page template.

Google will suggest popular keywords, but of course it can't write content for a site. Google can, however, suggest similar words in other languages:

• Google Translate: Handles 50+ languages and takes text, URLs or documents as input.

• Google Language Tools: For a query in the user's language, Google translates the query to the desired language, completes the search in that language, and returns the search results in the user's language.

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