subject: Monitoring Your SEO Campaign [print this page] The optimization process can be divided into on-page and off-page activities. On-page optimization usually means using proper headings, keyword frequency, title tags, etc. There are also other on-page elements that are not clearly visible. Duplicate page titles or descriptions, broken links, search engine crawl errors are some of them. The easiest way to find such problems is to use free search engine tools like Google Webmaster Tools. Yahoo and Bing also offer such tools where you can monitor your website, but Google offers much more than just simple monitoring.
Webmaster Tools is a place where you can find out if your website is indexed, learn about top search queries then have returned pages from your website, get the number of external and internal links to your site, the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site and much more. Here you can also get information about missing or duplicate meta descriptions and titles. Those types of problems are not fatal. Your pages will still be indexed, but will be ranked lower.
Meta descriptions are usually used for page snippets in search results. Web page title and snippet is the only description of the page visible in search results. Therefore it makes sense to make them unique and descriptive. Some content management systems like Joomla create pages where they use the default meta description for the website. In such cases it is usually possible to create unique descriptions with some additional module or plugin.
In Webmaster Tools you can also get a list of links to non-existing pages or documents. This is a great information to make the website user friendly. You can also check web addresses that are restricted by robots.txt file. This file is used by most search engines to specify directories which should not be crawled. Sometimes you may specify more than is needed and thus preventing search engines to access some pages. An additional benefit of using monitoring tools is to check how many pages are indexed. You can submit a sitemap file which lists all your webpages and you will get information how many of them is actually indexed. Another very useful information you can get here is a graphical representation of the time spent downloading a page. This time is usually shorter than the actual time needed to visit the website. If this time is high you may spend some time to optimize pages for faster loading.
Some page elements may significantly contribute to better ranking, but not all elements are clearly visible. Webmaster Tools offers a centralized place where you can be informed about any problems your website may have.
