A new webmaster may not be aware that the major
search engines offer some extra tools that they might
find useful. As a general rule you only need to have
registered an account with them previously. In all cases
listed here a simple email account with them will allow
you access to the tools.
Google offers their Webmasters tools which are quite
comprehensive although I have observed that the
results they give you in regard to your site will wildly
fluctuate.*
*Please note: This is only my experience, it may be
different with your site(s).
Yahoo! offers their Site Explorer. It doesn’t seem to
offer quite as many controls and options as Google’s
but their results seem to be a bit more stable and
they do let you see when your pages were last
indexed by their searchbots, very handy if you have
been updating pages and want to know if the updates
have been indexed.
MSN offer their Webmaster Tools as well. It would seem
to still be in it’s Beta form so I can’t really tell what
features it will have when it is finished and operational.
However, I will say what I saw was impressive and should
be fairly useful.
In all cases you will need to validate your site by either
included a meta tag or by uploading a file to you site’s
root directory. Personally, I find uploading the file to
be the simplest and quickest option.*
*Note: Google and Yahoo! will provide you with a
pre-generated XML file that you can upload. MSN
however provides you with a file name and an HTML
code to make the file yourself. It is fairly simple and
painless. Open a notepad and copy the code to it
and save the file using the file name they provide.
Under Windows you will need to select Save As
and select All Files in order to save the file as an
XML.
