Useful Google Tools
Some of you might have seen this post before it became a general Google Tools post. I have some time now so I am going to shoot through some tools from Google I find particularly useful.
Obviously, this is one of the most useful tools out there and so many people are only scraping the surface (including me probably).
There only seems to be an innocuous little text field in the middle of your screen, but there are so many useful ways you can interact with Google.
The top three I find myself using most often:
- define:innocuous
The define: operator is awesome, my spelling is pretty good, but sometimes my mind just throws up words that either I don’t really know the meaning of or my brain has a fart and I can’t remember how to spell them. This way, you have the best of both worlds and you can improve your knowledge of those words that you really only know the meaning of in certain contexts - so you don’t end up looking like a tosser putting them into reports for customers etc.
- site:franktank.com
Often I want to know how many pages are indexed for a site by Google, these days with the supplemental index it can get a bit mor tricky but thats for another post. The site: operator is another one that I find using fairly frequently, gives you a good idea about the depth of Googles crawling and how trusted/well designed a site is. Possibly even more importantly, it highlights any blatant flaws with the site, such as a completely javascript/non-spiderable menu.
But thats only without adding in a search term. If you have a site that provides you excellent information or a reference on a certain topic then you can use the site: operator in conjunction with a search term like so:
display css site:w3schools.com (usually the first entry is the winner for this search of css definitions)
set site:dev.mysql.com (great for looking up obscure sql commands’ syntax)
- old units in new units
This is one you definitely want to play around with. Just try it, ‘11 feet in inches’. You can try anything, ‘28 in roman numerals’, ‘12 pounds in kilograms’, ‘11000 miles in nanometers’. Anything! Including, and this is VERY handy, currency conversion. So, you will find ‘10 NZD in GBP’, or you don’t even need to use the currency codes like so: ‘10 New Zealand Dollars in British Pounds’. Now you can see why so many people from Britain holiday here, not just the weather but they end up being about 3 times richer!
So that is the top three that I find myself using, there are a number of others of course, which are more useful for seo really, bearing in mind that link: is not particularly accurate on google - you can ask Matt Cutts, I think he mentioned something about the Google team wanting to discourage the number of queries being generated by users just in order to see what backlinks a site has to try and judge/gain that ever coveted PageRank. Matt recommended Yahoo Site Explorer - which seemed interesting to me, obviously Google gets so fed up with these types of queries that they are happy to hand you over to their competitor.
Anyway, here is a guide to these operators - onto another top Google tool on the list:
Analytics is simply awesome. I had never played around with Urchin before using Analytics and I was blown away by the usability and sheer amount of data and varied ways you can manipulate it.
It takes days just to get a handle on everything in there, mind you, setup is a breeze. Copy and paste some javascript into the template of your site and you are away. Setting up goals is straight forward too, find a page you would like to track the usage of and enter it into one of the goal slots. If you have a contact form or something that submits to itself you are going to want to track how many users submit the form and actually contact you, rather than the number that simply visited the contact page.
In this case I suggest either, adding aome kind of dummy get variable to the form submission address or going the whole hog by setting up a dummy url pointing to the same page using something like Apache’s mod_rewrite engine. However you do it, you want to generate a unique URL for the successful submission of the form.
Once all this is set up there are a tonne of details and stats you can go through which I am not going to bother touching on here. But I will tell you that I found studying towards the Google Adwords Professional exam extremely useful, as well as the official Analytics blog and conversion University.
Next item on the agenda:
Google groups are great. Subscribe yourself to all sorts of groups and get emailed updates on the activity in those groups - the emails can be brief overviews of activity too, so you don’t get an email for every post made (of course, the option is there if you want it).
There are some great SEO and SEM groups out there, you do tend to find a few people self promoting, but the majority of time there are some interesting topics floating around.
Hmm, what else? There is so much…
Google Webmaster Tools
Submit your site. Submit your site map. Wait anxiously by the screen waiting for you crappy little blog to get indexed. Some people say no to Google Sitemaps, personally I haven;t had any bad experiences but I’ll be the first to admit I certainly haven’t exhaustively tested. So check out the webmaster tools, they’re not just for webmasters.
Finally…
What a little gem. The gem of the ‘plex I’m betting. It is impossible to say how much money Google is making from adwords right now, but you can bet its a shitload.
Got a site that isn’t making it into the index? Not in the top SERPs? Pay Google and worry no more.
Its a nice system they have going over there I have to say. The best thing is, you are only paying for clicks, you are only paying for people that have already registered an interest in your products, and you are only paying very little for the privilege of having them browse your site! Thats not a bad selling point right there.
Another little nicety of their system - sites with excellent/interesting/funny content invariably get more inbound links (well they tend to). Commercial sites which sell stuff and have the money to spend on advertising do not. So maybe they don’t appear so high up in the SERPs because every mom & pop shop isn’t going to be bothered optimising their site content. However, they are willing to part with some cash to get some good customers through. Viola, and there you have it.
Well, that is enough now, I will be back soon though promise.
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Tags: adwords, google, SEO, spiders, tool
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