The Google Webmaster Tools website allows website owners to register details of their own website to Google and includes several tools which allow you to further improve Google’s understanding of your website and its target audience.

One of these tools allows you to set up your geographic target when it is not obvious which region your website should be served to in Google’s search results.

Search engines generally operate within geographic regions so, depending on which country you are searching from, you will receive more relevant results. To gain the information on which country your website is targeted towards, the search engine generally look at details such as which country your website is hosted in, the location of websites that link to your website and most importantly which country your domain name is targeted towards. So if your domain name is a .co.uk then it is obvious to the search engines that you are targeting the UK, if your domain was a .de then obviously Germany. The problems arise when you have a .com (.net, .org etc.) domain, this is when search engine will look more towards the hosting location and incoming links to gain the geographical information.

But now Google Webmaster Tools allows you to override this information, if you have a .com or similar domain name, and choose which geographical location you are targeting. The advantages of this are that you do not have to change hosting locations or concentrate on gaining incoming links from other websites within your region. Plus there is also the option to change your geographic target location at a later date if necessary.

Again Google are leading the way when it comes to innovation within search engines and search results and hopefully the other big players such as Yahoo! and MSN will catch on and offer something similar soon.

A lot of companies who have a website often purchase variations on their domain name to catch visitors who may type in .co.uk instead of .com or may misspell or use a common abbreviation of the company name, whilst also preventing competitors from registering these domain names. Usually, rather than showing visitors a blank (or error) page, the company will park the domain name on their main domain to help point visitors to the company website.

A common mistake is to not 301 redirecting the parked domain name to the main domain name. The problem that arises is that the search engines now see two (or more depending on how many domain names are parked) websites with exactly the same content and will penalise individual pages from each domain which they see as the duplicate page. This will also detract weight from the rankings of the website as a whole. So by adding a 301 redirect from the parked domain to the main website you will not only prevent the previous explained scenario, you will also be telling the search engines that previous pages they have indexed from the parked domain have not disappeared but have moved to the equivalent page on the main website. This should prevent you from losing any rankings that may have been gained through the parked domains.

A common way to 301 redirect is to use a .htaccess file with the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.parkeddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect any of the parked domain name webpages to the main domain name equivalent, for example: http://www.parkeddomain.com/about-us.html would be redirected to http://www.maindomain.com/about-us.html and so on.

When you wish to keep a record of the position of your website within search results for targeted search terms there are a couple of steps you can take to help with your manual checks.

First, if you haven’t already, download and install the latest version of the FireFox browser. Open a new browser window and within 3 separate tabs go to Google, Yahoo! and Live Search (or MSN). Now in each search engine do searches for your first search term (for example: Search Engine Optimisation). Then in each of the search engines you will notice the have either a ‘Preferences’ or ‘Options’ link, click on this and you will be taken to a page where you can make changes which alter the way the search results are displayed. In Google and Yahoo change the number of results per page to 100. In Live Search change the total results per page to 50 (as this is the limit) but also uncheck the ‘Group results from the same site’ as this will show truer positions for individual webpages. Save the settings and you will then be taken back to the results for your search term.

You will already notice that Yahoo numbers its results so that it is easy to quickly find your position within the listings for your search term. To do the same for Google and Live Search we first have to install the FireFox add-on GreaseMonkey. This add-on allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. We now need to add extra add-ons that work with GreasMonkey and these are Number Google Results and Number MSN Results from ilovejackdaniels.com. Click on the download links and choose to install. One more step you will need to take once all are installed is in the FireFox toolbar, go to Tools -> Add-ons and then click ‘Options’ in the GreaseMonkey add-on. Choose ‘Number MSN Results’ in the left tabs and in the ‘Included Pages’ section add http://search.live.* to the list.

So now refresh your search listings for your search term in each tab and you will have numbered results 1-100 in Google and Yahoo, and 1-50 in Live Search/MSN. To quickly find your position for a search term use the FireFox find tool (Ctrl+F then Ctrl+G to repeat find) and look for your domain URL in the results (eg. positiongoldltd.com). You can now set up an excel spreadsheet with say 10 search terms and quickly monitor and record your position in each of the search engines listings.