Known and well used by those experienced in search engine optimization, Google Webmaster Central is often overlooked by novice optimizers, web designers, and website owners alike (usually because they just aren’t aware of it). Webmaster Central contains a plethora of valuable tools to help you optimize your site, improve rankings and answer all your questions.

The three main areas in Webmaster Central are as follows:

1. Improve traffic with Google Webmaster Tools
   The tools section contains valuable information and utilities to provide you with statistics, diagnostics and Google’s indexing management for your website. This is also the section that allows you to submit your sitemap and check your reporting.
2. Find answers to webmaster questions
   News, tips, updates and webmaster best practices can be found in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, Help Center and Discussion Groups. If you ever wanted to clear up the confusion you might find in other SEO forums out there, this is an excellent place to start.
3. Submit your content to Google
   There is much more to Google than just a search engine. Depending on what your business has to offer there are more options than just submitting your site. Taking full advantage of everything Google offers can make a huge difference in your rankings (SERPs) but more importantly in your website traffic. Video, Books, URL submission, online and offline content submission (hosted by Google) and more. Don’t forget Google has a separate wireless search engine, Froogle (to submit your products to, and also a Blog search engine!

Beyond the three main sections of Webmaster Central Google includes many other resources for the novice and professional optimizer alike:

• Site status wizard
• Google Analytics
• Gadgets for your Webpage
• Google powered site search
• Developer Tools (Google APIs for maps and more)
• Adwords
• Adsense
• Google Website Optimizer

You will need to register for a google account to access all these tools and more, it’s free and worthwhile. Once you get logged in and set up your website in Webmaster Central you’ll then have to validate your site (this is how Google ensures that you are actually the owner or authorized agent of the site). Validation consists of either adding a meta tag to the index page of your site or uploading a file with a specific name which Google generates for you.

I’m not going to get into detail on all the features of each area in this post, just do yourself a favour and check out Google Webmaster Central if you haven’t already.