No professional SEO expert can afford to do without Google’s Webmaster tools. With Google being the dominant search engine that netizens use to find your sites, Google’s webmaster tools allow you to track how often and how much of your website the Google spiders are downloading.

Also, you can maintain a “sitemap” of your website that you submit to Google. The sitemap allows the spiders to reach even those URLs that are hidden away and are not easily accessible to spiders. In addition, you can “alert” Google in a variety of ways when you add or change content. You can remove outdated pages and prevent them from showing in Google’s index.

Google’s Webmaster tools also allows you see if there are crawling errors when Google visits your site. Meta descriptions, Titles and descriptions are all covered in it’s ambit. And finally, it lets you see which keywords were detected on your site and how your site ranks for various phrases – though I prefer Google Analytics  – more on that later.

For Google Webmaster Tools to work, you have to own the site or at least have read/write access to the files since it requires you to verify the site with either a meta tag or a specific HTML file.

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