Use The Tools, Webmaster Tools
Since I work a lot with pay per click and organic search results, I’m constantly working with Google applications. As a result, I have several Google “accounts.” If you advertise in Adwords, or use Gmail or use Google Analytics, you also have at least one Google “account.” If you only use your Google login for Adwords management, or you’ve never explored the “more” link in your Gmail account, it’s time you put some of that technology to work.
Google’s answer to Yahoo’s portal interface was to develop iGoogle – a personalized collection of pages or tabs, where you can customize content that you can have served up to you whenever you want it. All you need is a Google account. Log into whatever Google account you have and navigate to iGoogle.com. That’s your portal, dashboard, control room, whatever you want to call it. You just need to tell it what you want to look at.
There are many neat and nifty gadgets and gizmos you can put in here but one that should be on every SEO and PPC analysts dashboard is the gadget for Google’s Webmaster Tools. I have one tab devoted entirely to that set of data alone, so that I can monitor at a glance any crawl errors, or keep up with how many feed subscribers there are to my blog, spot site map errors or 404 errors, or even see the organic position of my site for certain search terms.
This could prove extremely useful to the harried SEO client manager – think about it. You just set this gadget up for your client in their iGoogle dashboard for them and allow them to have this glimpse into what’s going on without having to walk anyone through the menus in Webmaster Tools. The gadget readily displays the top 5 search queries and the site’s ranking right there on the screen. Clicking on the titles at the top of any of the little boxed stat excerpts will take the client into their webmaster tools for more details, should they require a little more of a look-see. Clients really just want a little more “control” over the process – this helps you give them a little insight.
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
