Verify Your Site And Take Advantage Of Search Engine Analytics

It seems strange to me that, given the amount of time and work we put into search engine optimisation, we don’t use the resources of those search engines to see how they see us. Each search engine offers analytics data that has been collected. Making use of the information that search engines can collect in relation to our sites is fairly straightforward. The first step is to have your site verified within the search engines.

Verification is a process where you prove to the search engines that you are responsible for them. The search engines ask you to place a small piece of code on your site. Generally speaking, only those authorized to manage the site have access to add files. Once verified, you will get access to the range of data that can be collected about your site. If you visit each of these links you can get your site verified.

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! SiteExplorer
• Bing Webmaster Central

Site verification does not guarantee indexing nor does it provide any indexing priorities. However, the information they provide can be very useful. Yahoo! is very prolific with indexing content – sometimes too prolific. I recently noticed one site with over 2,000 pages indexed, yet it consisted of only 700 pages. The problem was one of duplicate content caused by multiple URLs for the one page. Unless you have this information, you won’t know there is a problem.

Getting your site verified is free, it’s easy and can be done in five minutes. The analytics provided can be very useful and since they are free as well – why not make use of them. More importantly, get a feel for how the search engines see your site.