Google’s Webmaster Tools is a central location for webmasters to view and update diagnostic data concerning their websites in relation to the Google algorithm. What are some of its SEO benefits?

From an SEO perspective, Google’s Webmaster Tools has really pertinent information, such as “Top Search Queries” and “Links to your Site”. Top Search Queries” allows webmaster to analyze which search term or “keywords” are the most used on their site and which position in Google they are ranking for those keywords. “Links to your Site” lets you see the websites that are linking to your site. It even breaks down which pages these websites are linking to. This is invaluable to webmasters as this is the only way to get a comprehensive view of which sites are linking to you. Simply using the “Link:” command in Google only gives you a very limited report of a site’s backlinks due to Google’s stringent guidelines on privacy.

Google’s Webmaster Tools also facilitates your website’s crawlability. By using Webmaster Tools’ XML Sitemap Submission, you can submit an XML sitemap to help Google find the deeper level pages on your website. Webmaster Tools will also let you view errors in your robots.txt file, “Page Not Found” errors and even the last time the Google spider successfully accessed your homepage.

Personally, Google’s Webmaster Tools is one of the most useful SEO tools around and there are many reasons for using it.

For those who are not able to embark on a new website design this year as a New Year’s resolution mentioned in a previous post, there are other places where you can focus to keep your online marketing performance on track.  A great place to start when analyzing your marketing performance from previous years is your website’s analytics data.  If you weren’t tracking anything in 2009, then there is an easy New Years resolution for you!

If you have been tracking your efforts, what trends are you seeing?  Where has the majority of your traffic originated from: organic, paid, direct traffic or referring sites?  If you see that most of your traffic came through paid efforts, this might be a sign that shifting some of your focus to search engine optimization (SEO) to improve rankings may be valuable for you.  Over time, as you monitor your analytics, you may start to see an opportunity to pull back on the paid traffic and rely more heavily on organic traffic, which is free!

Within your analytics, continue to dig deeper beyond the source of the traffic to see the behavior of your website’s visitors.  What do visitors do when arriving at your site?  Do they simply leave after viewing only one page (also known as a bounce)?  In this case, look into where they are landing. There is a great report in Google Analytics called a Top Landing Pages report (particularly the Comparison view) which will enable you to have a quick and easy look at the landing pages that lead to a higher bounce rate than others. Or, perhaps you see many page views during visits, but very few conversions.  If so, think about the user experience and the calls to action throughout the site.  If you have an e-commerce site, perhaps it is the checkout process that is losing your visitors.

This year, strive to analyze your online marketing as a whole and source your analytics frequently. Within your analytics platform, it may be easy to look at a high level view of the traffic, but don’t ignore the detailed information available to you as well.  This can shed light into ways to reduce costs, such as by possibly making a shift from less paid traffic to more organic traffic.  Also use Google’s free tools, such as Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and Insights for Search to name a few.  These tools can help you to analyze your website’s data, perform tests to continue to make improvements, and identify search volumes and patterns over time that may be relevant to your website or industry.

In this tutorial, we will take a flat catalog image and create a more exciting 3D version.

Prepare your catalog image in a Photoshop layered file.

From the top menu select Edit > Transform > Perspective

Select the right bottom handle and slowing drag up a few pixels and you will see the perspective of the image change. When you get it to a similar angle as below, press Enter on the keyboard to accept the change.

Make a new layer. Select Layer > New > Layer

Select the Rectangular Marquee tool and draw a rectangular box on the left side of the image. This will be the spine of our catalog.

Choose a color from the Foreground Color picker.

From the top menu, select Edit > Fill
Make sure the Foreground Color is selected and click ok.

Your image should look like the one below.

From the top menu, choose Select > Deselect

Next, from the top menu, select Image > Transform > Perspective.

Select the left bottom handle and slowing drag up a few pixels, just like we did on the cover image. Press enter on the keyboard to accept the change. (If you have an actual image of the spine you can do the same technique to add perspective and align it with the cover.)

Lets finish it up with a nice drop shadow. Make a new layer. Select Layer > New > Layer

Select the Lasso Tool from the side tool bar and draw a shape similar to the one below. Control click on the PC, Command click on the Mac. Fill the selection with black and then deselect.

Now, let’s soften the edges of the shadow. From the top menu, select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Drag the slider until you achieve the look you want.

Adjust the opacity of the Layer to 15%.

Click and drag Layer 3 below layer 1 and you’re finished!