Don’t forget to Verify!!
All of the top three search engines provide you as a webmaster with various tools to be able to track your progress within their results which you may not know about. Google. Yahoo! and Bing all have a very similar “webmaster toolkit”:
To take advantage of the information they hold such as inbound links, crawl errors, top search queries, robots.txt validation among others you first need to setup an account e.g. a Yahoo! ID or Windows Live ID before you can claim your website as your own.
The second step is then to verify that you own your website and aren’t trying to scope out your competition for example and this achieved via one of two methods. The first option is to simply download a file from the webmaster tool or site explorer control panel and upload this via FTP to your website. This is perhaps the easiest option though if you don’t have access to FTP as you may be using a hosted website creator or ecommerce application the second option is perhaps easier. The second option entails copying a “meta-tag” from the verify page and pasting this between the <head> and </head> tags within the html code of your page. For Example:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="0HklOT7W-hR6OVO57hMEGx4ES4MnTo7OoYYH0wEz1tQ" />
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="20520C5400A1E038BE1D528CE5C068FE" />
<title>SEOGear Search Engine Optimisation Consultants</title>
The two lines highlighted red are Google and Bing validation tags on the SEOGear home page.
For more informaiton on the different search engines tools use the following links:
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