If you want some pretty handy statistical tools for your website or blog outside your own cPanel’s stats like Webalizer, then have a look at Google Webmaster Tools. You need to have a free account with google (most of you probably already have) and then copy and past a meta tag into the header of your website or blog that you want to do the analysis on.

There are plenty of tests you can perform on your site, from checking the functionality of your robots.txt file (if you have one), to listing your incoming links (very handy to gauge how your page rank efforts have been going). You can analyze individual pages within your website too.

There is a section under sitemaps that got my attention, as I’d added an XML sitemap to The Honest Way several months ago. Guess what? I hadn’t added it in the webmaster tools page, so although it was sitting there all this time, google (probably) didn’t know what to do with it! Well, I’ve set that mistake right!

My main reason for spending time with this tool is to figure out how many back-links I’ve got coming into the site. It seems they only show links crawled up to the end of July, so all the extra link gathering I’ve done this month doesn’t show yet.

All in all a useful tool if you need to gather statistics on your site. I don’t want to go into too great detail here, as it’s pretty user-friendly and straightforward to use, so this is really just an overview of some of its points that I found useful. If you haven’t tried it yet, go ahead and see what you think. It might be useful to you too.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

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