22 November 2005 in Search Technology | Comments enabled

Recently I’ve been plugging in the free tools from Google.

First off, Google SiteMaps. Using SiteMaps I can…

• Tell Google what pages are in my site
• Rank pages within my site on how important I think they are
• See details on what Google has given me for a PageRank
• See what searches people use which brings up my site
• See what searches people use when they actually click the link
• Ping Google when I make changes to certain pages
• Tell Google how often to recheck certain pages (homepage, comments, static pages etc.)

It doesn’t look as polished as Google Analytics but the information and functionality you gain from using Google SiteMaps is great. As a side note, if you’re using WordPress as your blog software there is a great plug-in that makes using SiteMaps easy. Click here to get it.

Next up is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics focuses a bit more on general site statistics. There is also a lot around adwords and how to better use those however as I don’t use adwords on my blog I don’t know much about this. Personally I just want to look at some pretty graphs to see how I’m tracking.

I’m still waiting for Google to step their game up on Analytics, I signed up on Monday last week and I’m still getting apology messages saying they’re overloaded.

I wouldn’t be suprised if in the longer term the SiteMaps functionality and the Analytics get rolled into one.

If anyone has any feedback on their experiences with these two tools then post below.

– JD