Google Webmaster Central Blog Celebrates 2007

[frankcois]

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted a review of its developments from last year just two days ago. It was a good list. If I were to say which development is the most important I’d have to go with the Video Sitemaps announcement last month. As more and more people go online and more people start using higher bandwidth connections, more marketers will start using video. This will become a very important tool for a lot of viral video marketers in 2008. It also has huge potential to be a long-lasting tool that will serve webmasters for many years to come, and will only improve along the way.

Other notable developments for Google Webmaster Central last year include:

* Moved out of beta
* Extended support for link queries
* Introduction of the Message Center
* Robots.txt file analyzer
* Geographic targeting feature

I highly recommend that you subscribe to the Google Webmaster Central Blog. It’s one of the most important tools for webmasters anywhere online.

[Angelica]

So you’ve decided that you want a part of your site to be secure. Good for you. But how do you ensure that it stays secure?

Just in case you aren’t aware of it. Any time you see http:// in an URL, it means you are looking at a non-secure web page. By contrast, https:// denotes that the web page is secure. Typically, you’ll see the https:// in the URL on pay pages, whenever you are purchasing something and you need to give out credit card information or other personal data. If you don’t see the https:// on a page that asks for your personal or private information then run away. Don’t give up your information because it isn’t secure.

But there are other reasons for want to ensure certain web pages are secure. Maybe you have a membership site and you want to restrict access to the membership benefits of your site to your visitors who are not members. You may not necessarily need the https:// distinction in those pages, but you definitely should have a password system to give access to those site visitors who are members. But there are some other things you should do as well.

First, the danger of web security. You might make the mistake, if you are new to this area of webmastering, of leaving an unsecure link leading from the non-secure part of your site to the secure part of your site. If that happens then there is a hole in your security and anyone will be able to get in. To prevent that from happening you can add “nofollow” and “noindex” tags to your robots.txt file or meta tag. By keeping the search engine spiders from crawling your links and indexing your secure pages, you ensure that security holes are not leaked and that future searchers do not find your secure web pages in the SERPs. It’s a small measure you can take to ensure that the secure parts of your website remain secure.

[frankcois]

Andy Beal’s advice is stellar. GoDaddy is one of the best web hosts online and no blogger should go one day without Google Webmaster Tools. The information you get as a part of Google Webmaster Tools is unquestionably the best you can get anywhere. You can manage your Google AdWords account, read the Google blog, add your sitemaps, report spam and paid links, check your gmail messages, and they have a host of other features as well.

And GoDaddy? What do they have to offer? That’s easy:

* Hosting plans starting at $3.99 per month
* 24/7 monitoring
* Firewalls
* Dedicated servers
* Up to 2,000 GB data transfer
* Up to 200 GB disk space

When it comes to webmaster tools for you small online business, Google and GoDaddy make a good team.

[Angelica]

Last week, Brick Marketing launched another blog. The Website Marketing Journal is focused on bringing daily blog posts to help website owners improve their overall marketing efforts for each website they own. Going beyond search engine optimization and web page design, Website Marketing Journal is devoted to covering the full scope of marketing a website without it being too broad of a subject matter.

Website Marketing Journal was officially launched on September 1, 2007. Since then, Brick Marketing has posted five blog posts, including:

* Understanding Website Search Engine Optimization
* Website Marketing Tools For Building Your Safe List
* Easy Ways To Boost Your Website’s Lead Generation Potential
* Branding Your Website
* Choosing Better Keywords For Website Search Engine Optimization

Over the next few weeeks, Website Marketing Journal will cover the following topics more in depth:

* Website branding
* Website customer management
* Website lead generation
* Website local advertising
* Website marketing content
* Website marketing tools
* Website sales
* Website search engine marketing
* Website search engine optimization

For daily insights on how to make the most of your website marketing potential through organic search strategies as well as through other effective website marketing tools, be sure to read the Website Marketing Journal.

[Nickysemilo]

I dont agree.. godaddy is one of the worst webhosting service one could come across.. i prefer going with ipower....

[frankcois]

This is a useful feature. If you want to know how queries that led to increased traffic to your site have changed over time, now you can get this information at Google’s Webmaster Central. This has been a useful tool for webmasters all along, but now it’s even better.

Google is now letting webmasters see this information as far back as 6 months. If certain search queries that found your site six months ago aren’t leading to results for you now, you can go back and analyze that and find out why. Maybe you’ve watered down your SEO or maybe people aren’t using certain queries as much as they were six months ago. People do change their search habits based on past search experiences and they do get better at it.

In all, I’d say this feature is long overdue. I’m glad they’ve come up with it.

[Angelica]

so what kind of webhosting service you suggest....