7 Things Every Web Master Should Setup For Their Web Site
January 30th, 2008 by hbond{{chris}} As a web master information is your best ally.
What information though? We’ve put together this very simple list of services every web master should set up on their websites. The data you get from these tools will allow you to understand what’s exactly what’s happening with your site from a visitor and search engine perspective.
- Google Web Master Tools
- Yahoo! Site Explorer
- Live Search Webmaster Center
- XML Site Map / Site Map Generator (submitted to the three services above)
- Analytics (could be Google Analytics – its Free and comprehensive)
- Robots.txt file
- Clicktale or Crazy Egg (these are optional but boy they give great data!)
Once you’ve set your site up with all of these services you’ll be armed with enough data to really manage your website.
The three webmaster sites from Google, Yahoo! and MSN will help you understand how their spiders are interacting with your site and you can inform them of the pages in your site via the sitemap.xml file.
The Analytics will tell you everything that the users are doing on your site, where they are coming from, what keywords they are using to find you, and even how qualified a visitor they are via the bounce rate. You can even track conversions, and see where in the world they are coming from. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes analytics data!
The Robots.txt file won’t give you any data – but it will prevent the search engines from accidentally indexing those private spreadsheets only meant for management 
Finally, clicktale and crazy egg will help you understand in greater detail how users are interacting with your site. For example, we discovered that a particular headline for testimonials looked a lot like a link and people were trying to click it. So we made it a link and satisfied their needs!
So why would you not want all of this information? Almost all of it is free and available to you, so go set it up and get informed! It’s your business after all!
This information helps tremendously and I fully agree! I consider myself a pretty knowledgable internet marketer but learned some things I didn’t know here today.
I’m glad it’s coming in useful!!
Most niches won’t make any use of Live, but the others are good. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is the all around best backlink discovery tool available.
I agree completely! Thanks for the comment.
I only do the 1st and 2nd step.
I never mess with my robot.txt, too risky for me.
So there are 4 new things that I should do now, thank’s for the info.
You’re welcome! You can safely edit your robots.txt file if you setup the webmaster tools from Google or MSN as they allow you test your file for compliance with their bots!
Nice and informative article. thanks
Nice list. Have been using statcounter instead of google analystics. Any information on the difference.
Some tools may be useful, but you should also think about what your site actually needs because depending the site’s purpose you can add different gadgets.
Thanks for your 7 steps. From now onwards I follow the steps what you mentioned to avoid the mess between the sites. Thanks for the useful post