Many search engines provide a number of tools to help webmasters improve the performance of their sites in the search engines, and to help webmasters with the best practices. Google has a number of webmaster tools a collection of tools geared towards helping webmasters manage the errors within their site, and see how Google sees their website—has been developed by Google, and is available for use, freely. Webmasters can also create a sitemap in XML format, to tell Google of all of the pages within our site, their importance within the scheme of the site as a whole, and how frequently they are updated, to help them decide when to return to re-index the updated content.
The webmaster tools in general, outline errors such as duplicate content, duplicate metadata within pages in the same site, as well as broken or forbidden links. More information can be found on the following pages:
- https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40318
Site speed
One very new edition to the list of factors to a sites ranking in search engines is the speed of the site, as announced by Google in April 2010. Sites that take a while to load are penalized. More information can be found on the Google blog:
- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speedin-web-search-ranking.html
There are a number of tools available to help monitor and improve the speed of your website. Some potential tools include:
- YSlow from Yahoo!: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
- Page Speed browser plugin: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
- Articles on speeding up your site: http://code.google.com/speed/articles/
