While not anything new, a recent post from Google Guy Matt Cutts on links to 404 pages reminded me of a tool I used to use quite often but had gotten away from using lately.

Google’s Webmaster tools provides some useful information about your site in relation to how Google sees it as well as providing you some tools to possibly increase your visibility to the web’s most popular search engine. Using this along with a few popular Wordpress plugins could substantially increase your visitor count, at least the search engine referral portion of it.

To me the most important tool is the diagnostics which shows you errors encountered by the Googlebots while indexing your blog as well and their content analysis that points out problem with your blog’s meta data. Of course before running this analysis you might want to first install the Wordpress All in One SEO Pack to improve on Wordpress’ standard meta generation. This plugin will optimize your page titles and generate other important meta tags automatically.

The other useful function of Google’s Webmaster tools is allowing you to submit a sitemap from your blog to help ensure that Google is properly indexing your site. At times the Googlebot might not be able to find orphaned or poorly linked to pages and providing it with a sitemap ensures that it knows where to go on your site.

Of course Wordpress doesn’t provide a sitemap out of the box but no worries, the plugin Google XML Sitemaps does all the heavy lifting for you. The plugin creates and then constantly updates a Google compliant XML sitemap that you can easily submit to them from your account.

While the above tools and plugins aren’t a magic bullet to propel you to the top of Google’s index, they can help you find out why you are ranking where you are and give you a few options to possibly rank better.

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