Google already knows a lot about you and your website. Why not help them take the last remaining fragments of your soul, in return for better search results and tracking? Here are 3 simple tools that let you improve your website from behind the scenes.

Site Maps

Everyone likes to just put their faith in the almighty Google-sama, but have you ever stopped to consider why your site may not rank as highly as you’d expect for certain search terms?

Specifically, she was asked why one-fifth of Americans can’t find the United States on a map.

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps,” she ventured.

Yes, Miss Lauren Caitlin Upton, that is correct. All kidding aside, this actually applies to how search engines find pages within your site. Web crawlers usually go through your site page by page, and combine this with outside links to your site to come up with a list of all the pages in your site. As you might expect, this is not ideal. A sitemap provides web crawlers with a one-stop-shop XML file that contains every single one of your URLs and also some additional meta-data. You don’t want web crawlers doing a lazy, half-assed job of crawling your site, so make it easy for them; this will ensure that more of your content is taken into consideration for web searches.

If your blog is large, site maps are especially useful for web crawlers because they will usually only traverse your site through a set number of links. Fortunately, there is a Wordpress plugin that will build your sitemap for you, and even ping relevant services that take advantage of your sitemap. I am currently using the beta version of the plugin, and it is a wonder to behold. In case you were wondering, here is the SS!AB sitemap.

Google Web Tools

So you’ve clicked a couple options, pressed a button, and made your sitemap. What now? What was the point of all that work? Here’s the payoff: submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. Sure there are other search engines you should submit your site map to, but Google is the king, and the Yahoo Site Explorer is still wimpy.

It’s clear that GWT is still a bit of a work in progress, but there are a number of very cool tools in here. Basically, GWT lets you see (to an extent) how Google sees your site. You can see how often Google crawls your site. You also can look up the top keywords for your site, but more importantly you can see your site’s average Google rank for those keywords. This by itself is pretty phenomenal; for instance I can see that all Kungfucius’ hard work in doing early Bleach episode summaries makes our site come up as the top result for quite a few individual episodes (e.g. if you search for “bleach 60“).

The other really nice thing about GWT is that it gives you diagnostics on links that are broken. You can then submit these links to be removed, or tidy up your .htaccess to make sure the broken links redirect properly. In addition to checking on your own links, you can see every single link that Google has found into each and every one of your pages. This is a lot of very useful data.

Google Analytics

Most bloggers know of Analytics by now, but it really is one of the most powerful stats trackers available. More importantly, it’s free. Well, Google recently updated the interface of Analytics and it is a lot nicer. For those of you who do not like to hack core files (because it makes updating a pain), there is a handy plugin for automatically inserting the Analytics tracking code. The plugin also has a number of settings to load the code in the footer (to speed page-loading) or exclude admin clicks in the totals. All in all, Analytics is very useful and very easy to use.

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