If you are hosting your own blog or website, there are several easy ways to manage your Google search rank -

1. Sign-up for Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Use 301 redirects to preserve your Google search rank when you decide to change the structure of your blog or the file names of your articles.
3. Ensure that your blog or website is Google search compliant.
   

Why use Google Webmaster Tools? What does it do compared to Google Analytics?

Google Webmaster Tools gives you very valuable Google search rank information, including -

1. The top search queries that returned your site as one of its results. It also shows your Google search rank for each of those searches. In addition, you can access information on which searches resulted in clickthroughs to your website.
   
2. All websites that link to your blog or website. This information is provided by page so you can quickly see which pages within your blog have the highest number of external links, and what those external links are.
3. The most common keywords that Google search associates with your website. This will give you a quick idea of whether you are hitting all the keywords that you want. If not, you can rework your articles and then use Google Webmaster Tools to track those changes.
4. Crawl errors and crawl statistics from Google search on your website. This will help you fix broken links and show you how often Google search is analyzing your website.

Google Webmaster Tools provide you with Google search information on your website. This is in contrast to Google Analytics which provides you with website visitor information. If you run your own website or blog, you want to use both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

Signing up for Google Webmaster Tools is really simple. All you need is a Google account, which you should already have if you use Google AdSense or Google Analytics. Just click on the Google Webmaster Tools site, and log into your Google account.

1. After you log in, you will see a button for adding a site. Click on the Add a Site button.

2. Enter in your blog URL or your website URL and click on Continue.

3. At this point, you will need to enter some HTML code into the homepage of your website. This usually means the index.htm, index.html, or index.php file in the main directory of your website.

If you are using a WordPress blog, then open a new browser window and log into your WordPress administration area -

a) Click on Appearance >> Editor on the left of your dashboard.
b) Select the header.php file on the right of the screen.
c) Insert the meta code provided by Google right above the </head> tag in the file.
d) Click on the Update File button.

[Refer to the screen-shot below]

Note - there are other ways to insert this meta code into your WordPress blog. If you are using child themes, then just insert the meta code into your dynamic styles function.

4. After entering the meta information, go back to your Google Webmaster Tools window and click on the Verify button.

If you have entered your meta information correctly, you will be directed back to your Google Webmaster Tools homepage, and the site you just added will now appear below the Add a Site button.

5. Click on your new site entry to access its Google search information. Initially, the amount of information may be limited. It may take some time for Google to crawl your site and update your information and search statistics.

There will be times when you need to change the file-names of your website articles. You may also want to reorganize and rename your directories. When you do this, you want to make sure you do not lose the Google search rank of your existing articles.

You can easily preserve your Google search rank by using 301 redirects. This function will allow you to redirect any old files or directories to its new URL location. When users click on your old URL in their search results, they will automatically be redirected to its new location.

301 redirects are recommended by Google for when you restructure your website or blog, when you move your web domain, or when you merge multiple websites.

If your website is running on an Apache server, specifying 301 redirects is achieved through the .htaccess file on the root directory of your website. If a .htaccess file does not currently exist on the root directory of your website, you can create one using a simple text editor such as NotePad.

You can redirect an old file or directory to its new location by adding the following statement to your .htaccess file -

redirect 301 /Tech/ http://www.shibashake.com/HubPages/

This statement redirects my previous Tech directory, to my new HubPages directory. Note that you only specify the full http address for your new location. The old location is always defined with respect to the home-website containing the .htaccess file.

Now when I type http://www.shibashake.com/Tech in my browser window, I automatically get redirected to http://www.shibashake.com/HubPages.

redirect 301 /Doggie/dog_training.htm 
http://www.shibashake.com/dog-obedience/dog-obedience-training-good-bad.html

This example redirects my old dog training article, dog_training.htm to my new dog training article at dog-obedience/dog-obedience-training-good-bad.html.

Redirect 301 statements will work on both file-names and directory names.

You can also do advanced bulk redirections by using the wide range of redirect functions that are available.

If your website is not running on an Apache server, then this article gives you instructions on how to achieve redirections on a range of other server types.

Make sure that your blog or website is compliant to Google search by following Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Here are two important guidelines that jumped out at me -

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

~~[Excerpt from Google's Webmaster Guidelines]

We often pay a lot of attention to optimizing our pages for search engines, and forget about our human readers. Remember that it is our human readers who click on our ads and buy our products. Here are some simple ways to optimize your blog for your human users.

Also read through Google's articles on site ranking and site listing. These articles contain a lot of useful information on how to enhance your website or blog and increase its Google search rank.

Join HubPages and use it to help drive traffic to your home blog or website.