But the loss of this capability is more than offset by the benefits. Google Analytics visitor metrics gives you a bird’s eye view into very important statistics such as how your site compares against others of a similar size. You can even narrow this comparison to similar sites of a particular category. These comparisons are on metrics such as bounce rates, pages visited and the average time spent on a site.

Other useful information is also present such as what the profile of your users are and where they come from. You can view a breakdown of how many pages are typically visited and how much time is spent on your site. This combined with the information showed in content tracking makes analysis easy to find out why visitors are coming to your site and why they are leaving it.

Also, you can maintain a “sitemap” of your website that you submit to Google. The sitemap allows the spiders to reach even those URLs that are hidden away and are not easily accessible to spiders. In addition, you can “alert” Google in a variety of ways when you add or change content. You can remove outdated pages and prevent them from showing in Google’s index.

Google’s Webmaster tools also allows you see if there are crawling errors when Google visits your site. Meta descriptions, Titles and descriptions are all covered in it’s ambit. And finally, it lets you see which keywords were detected on your site and how your site ranks for various phrases – though I prefer Google Analytics  – more on that later.

For Google Webmaster Tools to work, you have to own the site or at least have read/write access to the files since it requires you to verify the site with either a meta tag or a specific HTML file.

However, this ignores the social nature of the web. In our first post on SEO software, I made the point that one must perform SEO in order to make it easier for humans to use your site and not just for search engines. By linking out, you make your site more useful to others. But how do we balance out SEO needs and usability needs?

The answer is inlinking. A logical reading of Google’s PageRankng algorithm gives us the answer. When you link to other pages in your site, you redirect more and more link juice into your web pages. Then the leak caused by linking out drops dramatically. For example, if you have just two links on your page. One to your home page and one going out, half the link juice goes out from the outgoing link. If you have 3 more inlinks, then only 1/5th of the link juice exits your site.

Most sites and blogs these days have numerous links going back into the site. Menus, archive pages, categories and tag pages. If you try and link back to pages in your site, you can happily link to external sites for the convenience of your users and suffer no significant penalty. This way, you’ll also be a good citizen of the Internet and your viewers will appreciate it.

By the way, it’s bad manners to use the rel=”nofollow” tag for links going out of your site. If you think a site is worth linking to, then do it justice by letting it have the credit for that link.