Explanation and Details

Webmaster services offer detailed technical information about how your site is interacting with the search engines and a few crucial ways to improve rank and prevent losses in your organic search engine positions. Ignoring or not fully utilizing these services would be like ignoring the "low fuel" or "check engine" warning light on the dashboard of your car. While the search engines are giving you information you need, the question is, will you know how to analyze it, maximize its value, or solve a problem when you see it? If the "check engine" light is on, should you try to fix it yourself, or bring it to your mechanic? That all depends on your experience and knowledge, and often a professional is needed. While you or your webmaster can set up these services and track information in-house periodically, DISC's 11+ years of experience with search engine marketing enables us to discern problems and opportunities in our Webmaster Services Report.

If you're already set up with both Webmaster services, DISC will provide a report with recommendations to help you better understand and act on the data.

Below is an overview of the vital data you get.

Google Webmaster Tools
(Quotations below are from the search engines.)

"Google webmaster tools offer an easy way to submit all URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google." Google Webmaster Tools offers the following vital information:

• Crawl information - determines how accessible your site and all pages are to the search engines and whether there are any problems, such as:
  • File not found
  • URLs not followed
  • URLs restricted by robots.txt
  • URLs timed out
  • HTTP errors
  • URL unreachable
• Website Content
  • "The content type of your crawled pages."
  • "The encoding used by your crawled pages"
  • Common "words in your site's content, and in external anchors to your site"
  • Top Queries - Shows how users are most often finding your site. An important tool in assessing and maximizing SEO.
• Indexing information - "See how your site is indexed and which of your pages are included in the index. If Google finds violations in your site, they will give you the opportunity to fix the problems and request re-inclusion of your site."
• Submission of Sitemap files - ensures that Google will index all of your important pages frequently. Although all sites should be coded to allow Google and other top search engine spiders to index your site without Sitemaps, there is growing anecdotal evidence that Google does not index and thus rank sites as well if you don't use their Sitemap program.
• Specify your preferred domain name - Indicate which of several domain names you would prefer Google uses when indexing your site. This solves the critical "canonical" problem, wherein your domain with and without the "www" can result in duplicate indexing and consequent risk of a duplicate site spam penalty.
• Robots.txt file validation - Will show if you have a robots.txt file and if it is being utilized effectively.
• Robots.txt file generation - "Interactively create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don't want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don't want crawled."
• Manage site verification - "See all verified owners of [the] site, and optionally reverify them."
• Set geographic target - "Associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area."
• Remove URLS - "Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal."
• Set crawl rate - "See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired."
• Enhanced image search - "Enable Google's enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google."

Yahoo Site Explorer Web Services

Yahoo Site Explorer is not as comprehensive as Google Webmaster Tools, but it is still valuable. Yahoo states that "you can use this information to identify any problems in your site representation such as bad link sources. You'll also know if you should provide additional metadata to Yahoo! through feeds or better language indicators." You find such information as:

• Indexing Data - Shows a list of all pages that Yahoo is indexing. Important in determining if your site is being indexed efficiently and thoroughly by Yahoo.
• Inlink Data - Incoming links boost your organic search ranking. This data tells you how many links from other sites (that are indexed by Yahoo) are landing anywhere in your site.
• Update Notification, or "Ping" - Allows you to notify Yahoo of changes to your site.
• By "authenticating" your site, additional information is available:
  • A list of all indexed subdomains from the site that Yahoo has indexed
  • Last crawled date of your site's URLs
  • Language detection
  • More details on the status of your site feeds, such as when they were last submitted and processed.

MSN / Live.com Webmaster Tools

Live Search's Webmaster Tools are on par with Yahoo's, with a few unique features. These tools are part of a group provided by Microsoft's Windows Live services, which allow webmasters to manage the indexing of their website, view site statistics, consolidate content, and much more. Users can troubleshoot issues, prevent incorrect indexing of a site, and with verification, view statistics such as:

• Crawl Issues - Displays issues found while MSN was crawling / indexing the site.
• View missing or bad links
• Identify URLS that may be too long
• Isolate pages that contain content not indexed by Live Search
• Backlinks - Shows which web pages are linking to your site. Allows you to see where your site is referenced, and further analyze your audience.
• Outbound Links - Shows where people are going when they leave your site.
• Keywords - Allows you to test your sites effectiveness using specific keywords.
• Robots.txt validation - Checks your robots.txt file for problems that may interfere with the indexing of your site in Live search.
• HTTP verifier - Currently in beta, this allows you to make sure your site is taking advantage of bandwidth saving features. Such as:
  • HTTP compression
  • Conditional GET

DISC's Prices for Webmaster Services Set Up & Report: DISC will set up your website(s) with webmaster services on Google and Yahoo, including installing the tracking code on your site or working with your webmaster to do so, and run all relevant reports. DISC will compile and assess the data in a report that prioritizes and explains problems, solutions, and opportunities. Price: $1575. Larger, dynamic sites may require an additional $450 of labor to set-up an xml feed. Report Only: If your website is already set up with webmaster services, DISC will provide a report with recommendations to help you better understand and act on the data. Price: $700 Quarterly Reports:DISC provides a variety of more robust reports, including the highly recommended Quarterly Report. This doesn't have to be done quarterly, but every web marketer should get at least two such reports per year (and a few brief reports really should be run monthly). It assesses and makes recommendations on all facets of your SEO and on a few merely technical matters that should be checked periodically. For more information, please see our page on Quarterly Reports. DISC's proposals and phone conversations will provide more details and answer all your questions. DISC offers rock-solid proof of our years of superb results in all of our services, in the form of detailed ROI reports delivered to actual clients. We need a signed NDA in most cases, so we offer this proof only to people who have received a proposal and remain interested in DISC's services. DISC's estimates in our proposals are firm. We do not exceed them unless you add more work. If you have us do work that is not specified in contracts, it is billed at these hourly rates: $75 per hour for HTML programming $100 per hour for graphic design $175 per hour for database work and non-HTML programming $175 per hour for SEO, PPC, and other SEM $175 per hour for general consulting and training For a list of all of DISC's service prices, without descriptions, please our "Sell Sheet." For the client who wishes to invest in search engine marketing on an ongoing basis, DISC offers our premier monthly retainer service. Please click here to request a proposal. The RFP form takes less than 3 minutes to fill out. Thank you!