Formerly the artist known as Sitemaps. And if you are a webmaster, this will be the most important place for you right after your webstats console. If you haven’t sign up for Webmasters Tools, you should do it now. What it offers to webmasters is the ability to check crawl errors, look at your backlinks (always very important), see any problems with your Google Sitemaps, check your domain preference and much more. Oh and you can remove URLs from Google’s index by requesting a removal.

I mainly use this web tool to check my backlinks. How many backlinks I have and from which site are my backlinks coming from and use this information to improve my site instead of just knowing my traffic. A backlink is considered very important, so attracting backlinks should be one of your prime concern. It also tells you which site to concentrate your promotion or advertisements. You should make use of your webstats program with this backlinks tools. See whether the backlinks have been effective in attracting traffic as well. And I also use this web tool to check my Sitemaps for errors. Sometimes I use this tool to check whether Googlebot has any errors when crawling my site.

The URL removal request is actually very interesting, especially if you have a lot of old URLs you don’t want to be in Google’s index. I have seen a lot of sites which have a lot of old and unwanted URLs (especially URLs that have been changed or directed to another page which may result in duplicate pages) which the webmaster surely won’t want to be in the Google index and they can use the removal request to remove the URLs. I don’t know how fast they will do it after you submit the request but it sure is very useful.

And my plumpy hero Matt Cutts likes it too. That alone should give you the confidence of using this tool to improve your site.