by Guest Blogger, Lena West

I'm not easy to impress but the folks over at Google seem to always manage to win me over.

If you recall my post from two Mondays ago and the post from last week, we've been talking about taking the time to examine your business so that you can spend at least some time dedicated to growing the business.  You know I'd prefer that you spent MORE time but, I'll take what I can get for now :)

Now that you know what to do and how to get it done, you're going to need to the tools to get it done, right? Hint: the correct answer here, is Yes.  So, I figure, I'll grope around in my bag o' Internet tricks and find some cool tools that we use to help our clients kick *ss - and share a few with you. Let's see if you're really up for the task.

I can go on and on about this but, remember the section of questions dedicated to your web site, top search keywords and top referral sources?  Well, this tool will really help ya answer some of those.

With this tool, you can learn:

• which other sites share similar content to your site.  Who cares? Can anyone say: 'competitive' intelligence?  This list of sites will probably contain your direct 'competitors'. And, if you aren't paying attention to this, well...I don't know what to tell you.
• the most common words people use to link to your site
• how many sites have links to the various pages on your site
• the exact date of the last time the Googlebots crawled your site
• whether or not your site is indexed in Google - and how to get it indexed if it's not
• your overall Google page rank
• the most common words on your web site and your last-checked rating for that keyword (This should give you tips on how to tweak your copy. If you're not ranking high enough on the keyword you want, guess who's got some rewriting to do?)
• and more...

Ok, ok, so where is it?  Find it here. It's called the Google Webmaster's Tool.

You'll have to prove to Google that your site is actually yours so, you'll have to add a bit of code to your meta tags or upload a file with a file name that Google specifies.  If you don't know how to do this, don't let this stop you. Ask your tech person or VA to do it. It takes 30-seconds and you won't regret it.

After all, Google can't have just anyone checking anyone's stats.  But, once you go through this 30-second security checkpoint, you'll have free reign to poke around and find out some cool things I'll bet you don't know about how people are finding and linking to your web site online.

And, hey, let's see who's reading and paying attention. I haven't had a contest on this blog in a long while. If you've read this far, congratulations. If you haven't then, oh well for you. Let me know - via comment below - the one most astounding thing you learned about your online business/web site from using the Google Webmaster Tool and I'll randomly select one high-achieving commenter to get a special regalito.

NOTE: The prize will be given totally at random and the length of your comment will not affect your ability to win.