Sharing the Google Webmasters Tools love

Many people are familiar with google analytics, a free service from Google that provides traffic statistics. Fewer are familiar with google webmaster tools which is packed with all sorts of useful information about your site. Google webmaster tools gives you a number of hints on what to change or fix on your site to help it rank better, you can register sitemaps, see information on crawl information, and even on your site performance.

However up to now, it’s been a pain to help clients, especially the less technically knowledgeable ones, set up verified google webmaster tools access to their site. For every google account, you had to upload a file to the root directory or add a meta tag to the home page. Now, as long as you have one user is verified, that user can easily add additional verified users.

In a blog post, sharing the verification love, the webmaster central blog outlines how it is done. The one caveat is that the access is binary. Unlike google analytics you can’t give “read only” access.

web site speed does matter

If you are into SEO (search engine optimization), you probably know who Matt Cutts is. Matt Cutts is a top software engineer at Google, and has a well followed blog. Recently he commented that google may start taking into account site load time in its rankings.

While likely not a factor in the rankings until 2010, and the impact maybe small, it’s something to start thinking about. After all if your site is slow, page rank might be the least of your problems. Owing to the notorious fickleness of users, if you don’t grab their attention in 2 or 3 seconds, they are on to the next thing.

Google webmaster tools has a new feature for you to quickly assess your site’s performance. Under the labs section you will find a “site performance” link that will tell you the average page load time and how you rank against all the other web sites on the internet. If you are slower than 85% of the other web sites on the web, you have some work to do.

Check out the google webmaster central blog post on the topic.