Believe it or not home based business owners, this is one of the best kept secrets in the world of search engine optimization. Google and Yahoo will actually help you to achieve a higher ranking in the search engines for your home business! It’s true. When I learned this I was floored! They have entire portions of their sites dedicated to webmasters, and you can take full advantage of this – for free.
Google offers Google Webmaster Central, which you can access at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. Here, you will find an amazing variety of site tools, as well as answers to commonly asked questions regarding websites and optimization.
One of the nicest things you will find at Google Webmaster Central, for SEO usage, however is the Google Website Optimizer, found at http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/. This tool helps you to design better web pages by allowing you to set up tests which allow visitors to essentially tell you what they prefer. After signing up, and setting up your tests, you can get detailed reports with information that you need.
Another great – and important – feature of Google Webmaster Central is Site Status at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus. Here, you can find out if your website has been indexed by Google. Type in your domain and you will see whether or not the site is indexed, and when the last time the site was crawled. Here, you will also find out if Google has any problem with your site that may be preventing it from being indexed.
You do not have to be registered to use tools such as Site Status at Google, but it is free to become registered to use Webmaster Central, and the tools are incredibly useful. By registering, you will also be able to obtain information that you cannot obtain if you are not registered, such as detailed reports concerning errors found by the Google Bot and information regarding how your site is currently found through the Google search engine.
Yahoo offers Yahoo Site Explorer. The options and tools here are not as varied as Google Webmaster Central, but they are still useful. Through Yahoo Site Explorer, you can find out what sites link to a certain page, see a list of all of the pages belonging to any page that is already listed in Yahoo’s directory, notify Yahoo that changes have been made to your site, using the pinging service, or use their notification service to inform Yahoo of your site changes.
Learn to take advantage of these free tools for your home business that are available to you and provided by the two most popular search engines in the world. If you take the time to learn how to use these simple tools effectively, you will be surprised at how much better your home business site ranks in the search engine results.
