It happens over and over again. You create a website for a client, you get it moved from the dev environment to the live. Everyone is thoroughly happy with the work done. You celebrate. And then they ask you to monitor and maintain the website.
Not a problem you say, Google has their Webmaster Tools, I’ll submit your website to that, and it can allow me to check the sitemap is getting picked up, monitor 404s and so forth. Google will tell me everything about what I need to know about the websites performance.
However, did you know that both Yahoo and MSN have a webmaster central as well? Did you know that they offer different tools to what is offered by Google - and in some cases *gasp* better than the ones offered by the big G?
So I thought in this post what I would do I would outline the different webmaster tools on offer and highlight some different aspects of the tools and how it can give you a better indication of how the website is going via the search engines.
Google Webmaster Tools
Link: Google Webmaster Tools
I’m not going to dwell too much on this one, because my guess is that it is the one that is used most often by webmasters. Login via your Google account and verfication of the website is done via uploading of a html file (I have NEVER had success with the meta tag option. NEVER EVER.).
My favourite part of Googles services is the sitemap options, and analysis of how the crawls went, along with the areas of duplicate title and meta tags, cleaning up your SEO.
Also, there are some really nice greasemonkey scripts to analyse back links, such as the one that shows you anchor text and PR of the linking webpage.
All in all, its a good tool to analyse how your website is going against the largest search engine.
Yahoo SiteExplorer
Link: SiteExplorer
Yahoo throw you off the scent straight away by not calling it webmaster tools, but siteExplorer. Thats ok, points for being semi-original.
SiteExplorer is probably most well known in the seo industry for backlink analysis. This is not the time or the post to get mixed up in all of that, but I bet many of the people that use it for backlinks did not know it also doubles as your Yahoo analysis of your website.
What I do like is the easy submission of feeds of all types (rss, atom, xml sitemaps, etc) and procedures to put in place to help with dynamic urls. Unfortunately, it seems the skinnest in terms of features out of all the 3 major ones.
Live Search Webmaster Central
Link: Live Search Webmaster Central
Microsoft only just recentely overhauled their own webmaster tools platform, and also setup a fantastic blog that they are updating regularly. It is really great to see that Live Search are starting to take the Internet Development community seriously and providing useful tools and information. The other reason you should seriously consider taking Live Search more seriously as that according to some statistics, it is now locking in its position as the second most used search engine.
Verification is done via an XML file that you upload to your website, once again, I always steer clear of meta tag validation - but do recogonise that sometimes it is the only option.
One part of Live’s webmaster tools is the checking of HTTP compression and seeing if it was enabled. To be honest, I did not know much about it before reading about it on MSN, but now that I have, its amazing at the difference that it makes. That is something Google never has told me (or at least never made it easy to notice).
I like the way they format their crawl issues, and allow you to break it down to subdirectories, rather than just dump them all out in one massive CSV or coresponding format.
The keywords tool to check your performance for pages that suposedly perform well for a particular keyword I think needs to be tidied up a little bit, it just seems a little bit too generous for my liking with the green box system.
Conclusion
In conclusion, each service has its own pluses and minuses, but for a holistic approach to how your website is viewed by the engines, it only takes about 3min per engine to submit, and in my books, definitely worth the time - I was resubmitting and 1st time submissions whilst writing this post.
In order of usefulness, I would still say Google is out in front, closely followed by Microsoft, and then Yahoo - in my opinion anyway.
If you know of any other tools you should be submitting your website too, please leave a message in the comments on this post. I will probably then combine all the tools into one webmaster tools style post.
