Google is the king of the search engines. So when Google offers you a set of webmaster tools to assist you with your listings in Google, you would be silly not to use them, wouldn’t you?

With Google Webmaster Central and Webmaster Tools you can learn how Google ranks websites, how to submit all of your content to Google and how to improve traffic to your site.

Webmaster Central can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. There are a bunch of excellent resources for every webmaster on this page.

Google’s Webmaster Tools can be found at Webmaster Central. These tools can assist you with statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s indexing of your website, including sitemap submission and reporting.

To get started you will need to specify your website URL and then verify that you are the owner of that site (you will be required to add some code or a file to your website for recognition by Google). From there, you can diagnose how well your site is being indexed by Google, view statistics, learn which sites link to yours, get information about keywords used to find your site, specify sitemaps, and generate a robots.txt indexing file.

Sitemaps are relatively new to the web world. These are XML files that reside on the top level of your domain and which contain a listing of all pages in your site. These files make life easier for Google’s indexing spiders because they tell the spiders where to look and what to index. They are definitely worth setting up and there are a number of tools that can assist you to do so.   Try XML Sitemaps Generator, a server based generator that can be set up to auto-run periodically on your host.

Similarly, the robots.txt file sits at the top level of your website and directs Google’s spiders to indexable content. Google has a robots.txt generator tool here – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robotsgen.