Google’s developers tools offers a great way to manage how Google (and other search engines) will find out about how it should crawl your site. It doesn’t help search engine rankings, but it may help get your websites indexed faster.

The first step is to complete your website. Once it is ready to launch, generate a sitemap according to Google’s sitemap guidelines. Information on Google’s sitemap guidelines. If you use Dreamweaver, there is a great extension that will generate one for free at DMXZone. Get their free Sitemap Generator Extension.

Once the sitemap has been generated and uploaded to the root of your website, check your Google account daily to find out if your website has been indexed. Once it is indexed you will notice all the tools available. When you update your site you should upload a fresh version of the sitemap and re-submit the sitemap in your administration area to let Google know it has been updated.

Sometimes it may take a while for Google to index your website, but here is a trick that has helped me before. Place links to your new website in any blog, facebook, MySpace, or any other website you can. One site that seems to get crawled often is Squidoo. The theory is that when the googlebot crawls these other sites and finds links to this other site, then it will follow them and start gathering information on your website.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools I have ever used. Before I started using it I was trying to make sense out of confusing website traffic reports. Google Analytics is very user friendly and has tools to allow you to integrate with Google AdWords. With these reports you can find out where (geographic location) your traffic is coming from, how the traffic is being generated, how long users are staying on your website, what pages are the most popular, traffic patterns throughout your website, and some more advanced tools.

Why do analytics reports help so much? When I first started using it I had a website that I was trying to get to the top of Google for the search phrase hockey drills. It was struggling quite a bit and only receiving a minimal amount of traffic each day. After several months I researched the Analytics reports and found that people were actually finding my site by using the search phrase “ice hockey drills” which was still not a great ranking, but better than “hockey drills”. Therefore I started targeting other search phrases like ice hockey drills, animated ice hockey drills, animated hockey drills, and some other more specific search phrases. In one month, the hits tripled and they doubled for three straight months until they leveled out because the site had reached the number one ranking for all the search phrases I was targeting.

One of the best tools they offer is the ability to email reports to specified email addresses at times you specify. Therefore all my clients receive traffic reports when they wish and it takes no work on my part except to schedule them from my user account.

It takes time to get your natural search results to the top of your targeted search phrases, but in the mean time you can use Google Ad Words to guarantee that your site will be visible on the first page.

Website visibility is too important to overlook. Once you have an attractive website that gives your business or organization the look and feel you desire, consider putting additional resources towards making  your website visible.  Despite what some SEO companies will tell you, it will take time and there are no guarantees!

There are three things you must understand before embarking on this journey.  You must have patience,  it will take work (either by you or your website designer), and you will need content relevant to your subject.  With these three key ingredients you will get your website noticed by your target audience.