The Google Webmaster's Tool

This is also a free tool and you can sign up at this address: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

At Google Webmaster Central you can sign up for a whole host of free services as well.

Tip:

One great tip for this section is to sign up for Google Webmaster tools. Register your site with Google by either inserting a META tag in you home page or uploading a blank html file to your site. ( By registering your site with Google they will be sure to spider your site within hours of alerting them to it. Google states very plainly however, that this will not ensure your site will be indexed and ranked, but it doesn’t hurt either. Remember that your site can be indexed but not necessarily show up in the search results first three pages or first ten pages for that matter. For that you will need to do some SEO work which we will discuss in another tutorial.) Either of these two methods are easy enough to do however I find that uploading an html file is very easy and doesn't require any special software or the slightest bit of html knowledge just a simple way to FTP the file to your host.

To upload a blank html file, do the following:

Your next step is to create an XML Sitemap of your site and upload it to hosting account.

 If you aren’t using XSitePro you can get an XML sitemap created for free at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. XML-Sitemaps will create the Google preferred xml format sitemap up to 500 pages. If your site is over 500 pages you will need to purchase their full version and install it on your server. It’s a lot easier to have the xml sitemap function in your website building software, but if you don’t have it, you can do it for free at XML-Sitemaps. Since it’s a free service they exist mostly on donations. I have used it many times and have donated each time. I wound up purchasing their upgraded version eventually and it works really well. It works in the same way as XSitePro with the exception that you actually have to run it to create the sitemap whereas XSitePro does it automatically. XML-Sitemaps will also ping Google to alert changes and it also creates ror.xml and text sitemaps. The ror.xml format sitemap is for Yahoo and a few other directories and search engines. Google being the largest of the search entities it’s important to create the xml.sitemap format but Yahoo and others have a significant chunk of the search business as well, so you need both.

Once you have created your sitemaps with the XML-Sitemap service let Google know that your sitemap is up by going back to Google Webmaster Tools and verifying that the xml.sitemap is available. Then it’s pretty much a waiting game. Most of the time it’s spidered within hours, however it may not be indexed immediately and it may take months. Technically you have done all you can do to ensure it being indexed. The second most important thing to do is ensure that your content is relevant and you aren’t doing anything like paying for visits from the free traffic sites or any "black-hat" activity. Google, Yahoo and MSN Bing all frown on such activities so don’t bother. Getting a good, solid, free listing in the major search engines and directories is worth ten times the value of generating bogus traffic.

You can also learn a great deal from a Wbmaster's account.  You can see what search words Google actually see within your content.  You can see if there are any bad pages that Google can;t recognize. Chances are if Google has a problem with them then so do the other search utilities.

If you are serious about a web site business and you are committed to the long term with your website and business, these are the tools you will need to understand your website, visitors and dynamic.  Stick with it, it will pay you back over the long haul.