Best Ways to Review Your Ad Words

After considering visitors’ words, I visit The Webmaster Central Page Analysis tab to review my words. Page Analysis reveals the key phrases Google believes characterize your content. For this characterization, it studies the words on your site and the words in external links pointing into your site (“anchor text”). For example, suppose you’re a widget cataloger who can’t figure out why Google doesn’t display your site for “widget” searches. The Webmaster Central Page Analysis tab can help you see your site as Google does — the first step to making improvements.

Page Analysis shows that my site scores highly for “rimmkaufman” and “rimm-kaufman” (our company name), “rkgblog” (our blog), as well as highly relevant phrases like “Google,” “Yahoo!,” “SEM,” “search,” “search marketing,” “brand,” “non-brand” and “PPC.” These are appropriate results and indicate that Google’s algorithms have a good grasp of my company’s site content. I note that Google ranks “RSS” higher for its content than “paid search,” suggesting I should consider scaling back my blogging about RSS and place more emphasis on pay-per-click, as paid search is a core concept of the business.

The Sitemaps tab, arguably Webmaster Central’s most important feature, finishes up the tour. A Google Sitemap lets you tell Googlebot which pages on your site you want it to consider. (Bonus: Other engines now follow the Google protocol, too.) A Google Sitemap isn’t the same as a Web page providing an HTML sitemap for human visitors. A Google Sitemap is an XML file that lists every URL on the site you wish Google to visit, along with how frequently each URL changes and its relative importance. (To view a Sitemap, here’s the one for my blog: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/sitemap.xml)

A Google Sitemap is a powerful tool to get your content indexed properly. Creating a Google Sitemap XML file is easy. There are commercial and free tools to help.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing agency offering paid search services and Web-effectiveness consulting. You can reach him via his blog at www.rkgblog.com.