24 июн. 2006 г.

Google Gives A Few Webmaster Pointers

By Jason Lee Miller:

Google published an array of tips and tools to help webmasters better analyze their web offerings. In addition to a Sitemaps update that creates a more robust view of 404 errors, Google Analytics reminds the ROI-minded of how to compare AdWords clicks to organic and direct links.

The most notable of the Sitemaps updates are the new robots.txt analysis tool, a "snapshot of the status of your site in the index" that notifies of webmaster guidelines violations and includes a simplified re-inclusion request form. Google also added a comprehensive webmaster help center.

David Utter reported also on the Sitemaps update at SearchNewz, detailing a few other features:

Query stats for subfolders at a site may be viewed, along with the currently available stats for top-level domain visits. Google also increased the list shown in the report of commo words on a site. Terms like http and www have been removed from the list.

A user request led the Sitemaps team to increase the number of sites and Sitemaps that may be added to an account, going from 200 to 500. They also added the ability to test the Adsbot-Google spider that crawls AdWords landing pages against the robots.txt file on a website.

Also, the Google Analytics Team asks, "what's the average value of a visit from a certain website worth to you?" Team member Alden DeSoto briefly discusses how to measure the average visit to a website by comparing AdWords clicks to browser-typed direct URL traffic.

  • The answer can be found in the sometimes overlooked $/Visits column found in the Google Analytics conversion reports, including Campaign Conversion, Source Conversion, Overall Keyword Conversion and CPC vs Organic Conversion. In fact, because this metric is found in so many reports, you can compare per-visit values for organic search referrals, paid keywords, CPC campaigns -- and almost anything else you can think of. It's a great comparison metric that can help you shift your marketing budget to high-performing traffic sources and keywords.
About the Author: Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.