If you are using Google Webmaster Tools you are probably aware that, among many things that these tools offer, there is the ability to submit your web site’s sitemap to help Google discover pages on your website. Google Webmasters Tools can also provide some insightful information about your website. Among many different statistics you will see the page containing information about about “crawl statistics”. You will find there a graphic of Googlebot’s activity on your website over the period of last 90 days. Just like the one you see below.

In the past Google did not offer webmasters many options or saying about how ofter they can or will crawl your website. While from time to time, after determining that your website may use a faster crawl rate, they would offer you an option to change this rate. However over the period last few months I was never offered that option in Google Webmaster Tools for my websites. So I have trusted Google, as most of us do, to crawl and discover the websites in their own time, and have completely forgotten about the “crawl rate” settings.

It appears, however, that recently, Google Webmaster Tools have opened the option to set a custom crawl rate for the websites you have listed in your account:

The above option can be found under the main settings in your Google Webmaster Tools account, and it is quiet self-explanatory. Stetting a “slower crawl rate” will reduce Googlebot’s visits to your website. I would recommend not to set a rate slower of what Google is already doing, unless your are experiencing issues with bandwidth. The slower crawl rate will probably result in delay with indexing your latest content. If anything, you may want to experiment with a “faster rate”, if you think it takes too long for your latest content to appear in Google’s index.

For time being I will not customize the crawl rate for this website, as I am pleased with what Google is doing now. I will however experiment with few other websites with intention to report here how can you benefit for this option, if you can benefit at all.

I do. But I have not always been a huge fan Google Webmasters Tools. Yes I had a paranoia of “keeping things secret” from Google. However, lately I am not only rediscovering some useful things the tolls have to offer. I think I am becoming a fan.

One of the reasons for any webmaster to consider using Google Webmaster tools that it allows to submit sitemaps of your websites or blogs to “help” Google to discover the pages on your websites. Yes, it is not guaranteed that your pages will necessarily be indexed by Google, but when they are these tools can provide some very useful information.

For example today I have noticed that there are 57 pages on this blog that have “duplicate” meta descriptions. While I can not be certain how much effect this actually has on how well my blog ranks in the search results. I am assuming there may be some sort of penalty associated with those “dupes”.

It is very easy to find out if Google has issues with duplicate meta tags on your website. All you need is to log into your account and click on “Diagnostic” menu and then on “Content Analysis”. If Google has nothing to report under that menu I guess you can consider it a good news. In may case as shown in one of the screen shots above I have an issue with at leas 57 pages containing meta tags that similar or straight duplicate from other pages. If you are running a WordPress blog and an plugin that automates the process of creating metatags you may run into a similar problem. What is the solution? First you can probably block Google bot via robots.txt from indexing the duplicates, but I would not recommend doing so. Chances are those duplicate are result of category or archive pages on your website.

Many in SEO community think that meta tags do not offer benefits as far as Google is concerned. I have chosen to disable the plugin that is responsible for generating meta tags. If anything, I would rather suffer a duplicate content penalties based on the content of the pages rather than on meta tags.

The bottom line is that there are many benefits from using Google Webmasters Tools, and if you have not done it before give the a try now. If your platform is WordPress I highly recommend Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress- this plugin creates sitemaps for your blog that you can not only through Google Webmasters Tools but also through a similar services in Yahoo! and MSN.

Today many people believe that search engine optimization is a waste of time. I think it is based on misunderstanding of what SEO really is. This misunderstanding is often a result of negative users experience as far as relevancy of the search results are concerned. If you practice SEO in an attempt to manipulate search result to get to the top at any cost, you are very short sighted.

I belong to a group of people who believe that SEO can be very useful. I am mindful of SEO every time I write a new post, trying to provide useful and relevant content to the user. I don’t think I am cheating my way to the top of the search engine results. Every time I write an article, I want it to come up in top 10 results for a keyword or set of keywords.

Why 10 top results? Most of the internet users using search engines do not change the default settings and, after submitting a query, each page produces 10 search results. The top 10 search results across the search engines receive anywhere from 70% to 95% or more of all clicks.

I have recently discovered 103bees (HT: ProBlogger). 103bees is a very good analytics tool, which every blogger should use. It helped me to visualize the distribution of click over the keywords used to find this blog. One need thing about 103bees, that it also reports what position of the search results your website was found at. Take a look at the results for this blog of last few days:

As you can see, the likelihood of user ending up visiting your website if it found among top 10 results is 7+ times more than if your website was found on the second page (results 11-20).

When creating new content for your blog or website, you should be mindful of good SEO practices. It can produce impressive results.

Picture speaks lauder than words. This of course is true as far as human beings are concerned. But it is not so with those little spiders that often crawl your website or blog. In fact they can use a little help to understand and make sense of the images posted on your blog.

To have them understand better your images, you can effectively use two attributes alt and title inside the img tag on your pages and your blog posts. If you are not familiar what do they stand for here is a short overview:

• ALT attribute is text value that is displayed instead of the image itself, should your visitor have disabled to load images when visiting your website. Some times you can notice this text value loads slightly faster than the image itself.
• TITLE attribute, which should not be confused with TITLE tag found in the header of the page, can be used to enhance just about any element of your page. When it used inside the img tag or a link, it provides an elegant effect when a user hovers with their mouse over the image or link. Try to hover with the cursor pointer (mouse) over the image below:
  

Both title and alt attributes are considered as part of your page’s content by the search engines.

Nothing will demonstrate the proper better way of using alt and title attributes than actual examples.

Here is the first scenario. Many of the HTML editors and even Blogging platforms create an empty alt attribute. The image below is example of default setting of HTML editors or blogging platforms for adding pictures to your web page:

Here is the source code for the image above:

As you can see the alt attribute contains the name of the file and the title attribute does not exist at all. If you use images on your blog or website chances are that each file is named after the date and time when the picture was taken. This of course provides very little information as far as search engine bot is concerned.

Here is another example of the same picture but with enhanced alt and title attributes. Hover the mouse over the image to see the differnece:

And here is the source code for the above image:

The above image speaks not only to a human being but also to the search engine bots communicating important information about your image or picture through alt ad title attributes. The value of both attributes is considered to be part of the content of the page.

In real estate using these attributes can prove to be very effective from the SEO point of view. Especially when Google is concerned. Google uses the value of the attributes when the image search is performed.

Next time you write about a new listing or place a picture of a home on your blog, make sure to use effectively the alt and title attributes. If your blog uses WYSIWYG editor, it would be better to turn it off so you can modify the scour code of your images. This may take some time to get use to. But when you conquer it, I am most certain that no future image on your blog will appear without these attributes.

To rank well in the search engines, you must create unique content. No one other than the real estate agents are in position to provide truly unique content. {sarcasm}Unless of course a house is listed by two different brokers{/sarcasm}

Update: At the advise of fellow blogger and SEO expert, I am updating this post with a video by Google’s Matt Cutts talking about importance of enhancing your images with alt tag: