Google has some great webmaster tools that can help you analyze your site and make running your site easier and more efficient. Most of these tools are found in their webmaster’s tool package (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools) which contains a variety of very useful things. You can use these tools to verify that you are the owner of the site and you can upload you sitemap right to Google and see that it has been verified. You can also see when Google last crawled your site.

Perhaps the most important information these tools provide you is a section that tells you what Google sees and where you rank for keywords. When Googlebot crawls your site and indexes it you can see what keywords it is indexing and in what order they are ranking them. If your desired keywords are not near the top of that list then you know you have some work to do and you might want to re-optimize your site. You can also see where you rank in the search engine for these keywords and what percentage of your traffic comes from what keywords.

For example if Google sees your site’s number one keyword is apple and you are optimizing for apple you might be happy, until you see that you rank #459 for apple and are getting very little traffic for that keyword. However, when you see that you are ranked #9 for ‘apple pie’ and getting some good traffic for that keyword phrase you might rework your site to get ranked even higher for ‘apple pie’.

Google’s webmaster tools also allow you to see if there are any dead urls on your site or pages that the Googlebot can’t reach. It also has a section on the site where it can tell you if it found any potential problems with your site in the meta tags or in the text of the site.

Another great feature is the inbound and internal links data. This information tells you what pages on your site have inbound links from other sites pointed to them (and from what sites they are coming) as well as what pages within your site have internal links.

There is a tools section of the webmaster tools area that can help you generate a robots.txt page for your site, help you optimize your site for Google images as well as remove urls from Google or analyze parts of your site. These tools can really help you fine tune your site to get the most traffic possible.

The Google webmaster tools section is a must see for any serious webmaster. There are many great features and they are all free. These tools really help bring your site to Google’s attention and they give you some top notch information that can really help you optimize your site and get the most out of it.