Google Tools and Your Blog / Website

I've recently discovered Google's Webmaster Tools, a rediculously cool set of tools published by Google for checking out just exactly how your site is crawled and indexed.  It allows you to see what keywords are drawing users to your site, as well as the words that are most used on your site.  In other words, it lets you see your website the same way the Googlebot sees it.

This is really very cool for those of us who care about getting traffic to our site.  Google is the single largest, and most used, search engine on the internet, so getting ranked highly in their index is, well, pretty much the best single thing you can do for your site.

Webmaster Tools is accessed via http://www.google.com/webmasters.  You've got to have a Google account in order to access it, but you can sign up for that right on the Webmaster Tools homepage.  Once you're signed in, you can add sites to your account, verify those sites so you can access more in-depth reports, and learn all about how Google sees your site.  I'm not going to get into all the details on how to set that up here, but I will say that it is extremely easy, and Google provides a load of good documentation.

At the end of the day, the only good way to up your site's page rank is good, well written content.  This is illustrated particularly well on Webmaster Tools.  Go ahead and check it out.  It could teach you a thing or two about your own website.