An indispensable tool in your SEO arsenal is Google Webmasters (formerly Google Webmaster Central, and currently in transition to be renamed Google Search Console). Google Webmasters gives you valuable information that can help you improve your website and your search engine rankings. It is also widely believed, though hard to prove, that simply registering your site with Google Webmasters serves as a trust factor that can bring additional authority to your site and improve rankings. You can use this tool to find out how often your site appears in Google's search results and for which search terms, and to upload a sitemap to ensure that Google can find all of the pages in your website and get information about any errors Google may have experienced while trying to crawl your site.

To sign up for Google Webmasters, point to http://google.com/webmasters and log in using the sign-in information for your Google account. If you don't have a Google account, you...