Google Tools

Most of us use Google as our search engine of choice these days. A staggering 304 million searches per day are handled by Google.

Keen to keep its place at the top of the search engines, Google has been very busy making sure that people continue to find what they are looking for when they use their search engine. They know that serving up relevant websites for their customers will keep them coming back for more of the "Google Experience".

This is great news for businesses because Google has been creating many free tools to help website owners to improve the quality of the traffic their websites are getting. Google really wants to put you together with customers who want to buy your products because a happy customer for you is a happy customer for them.

Did I use the magic words "free tools"? Yes I think I did.

Google has lots of free tools that you really should be using if you are serious about your business. I've listed them below.

Over the coming weeks I am going to put together detailed webinars (Seminars on the Web) on these tools to show you how to get the best out of them. Go join the forum or signup for the newsletter if you don't want to miss these.

Google Webmaster

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Google Webmaster is a great tool for giving you an overview of how Google sees your website.

Want to know when you were last indexed?
What to know who's linking to you?
Want to know if Google is having problems indexing your site?

Google Webmaster will tell you this and much more.

Interested?

Ok, follow the link to find out what is Google Webmaster.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool. I amazed at how much they have packed into this free tool. You get a really in depth view of the traffic coming to your site and not just from Google.

With Google Analytics you can see

what keywords people are using to find your site,
what pages they are arriving at your site (most people wrongly belief that all their visitors arrive at the home page first),
where in the world their visitors are coming from,
which sites are referring visitors to the site,

and much, much more.

I urge anyone who is serious about their website to try Google Analytics. It's free but do be warned you can happily spend hours looking at the results. I did!

Google Adwords Editor

If you use Google Adwords then you might want to consider this free tool. Google Adwords Editor allows you to download your Adwords campaigns to your computer and make changes offline. You can apply multiple changes across campaigns and adgroups rather than having to enter each one separately.

I've only recently started to use it and the interface is a little unfriendly. However I'm sure they will refine it over time. I certainly found the duplicate keywords feature very useful. Follow the link below to download and try it yourself.

http://www.google.com/adwordseditor/

Google Toolbar

It seems everyone wants you to use their toolbar for your web browsing and I generally avoid installing toolbars onto my browser. However I make an exception for Google. Their toolbar is quite good and it has one very useful feature.

Their toolbar shows you Google's page rank of the page you are currently viewing. This is great for those who are looking for sites to get links from or even when you are checking out the competition.

Again, it's free and you can download your copy through the following link.

http://toolbar.google.com/