SmallBusinessNewz

Google offers webmasters and advertisers a lot of helpful tools and resources. Most of them are free. If you haven't checked out any of the following, do yourself a favor and do so.

1. Webmaster Central

Webmaster Central is what Google describes as a "one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with visitors." It directs you to Webmaster Tools, the Webmaster blog, help center, forum, guidelines, and Webmaster Tools on YouTube

2. Conversion Optimizer

Conversion optimizer is a tool for AdWords advertisers that studies your conversion tracking data, predicts which auctions will perform the best for you, and adjusts bids on an ongoing basis.

3. Insights for Search

Insights for search lets you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames, and properties.

4. Google Blog Directory

The Google Blog directory is simply a directory of all of the company's blogs. This is a great resource for information on all things Google, and with Google being such an important part of many aspects of the web, you will do well to keep up with applicable blogs.

5. Local Business Center

We've discussed the Google Local Business Center at SmallBusinessNewz in the past. This lets you add/claim a listing to appear in Google Maps, and keep your business' info up to date. You can even upload coupons.

6. Google Help Centers

This is simply a resource that lists all of Google's help centers. Much like the blog directory, it is good to keep an eye on categories that apply to you and your business. The help centers are not only good places to get questions answered by Google staff and other users, but you can learn plenty of things you just didn't know about any given Google product.

7. Ad Quality Guide

Google just launched this ad quality guide last week, and it addresses frequently asked questions and offers additional tips about how to improve ad quality.

8. Website Optimizer

Website optimizer is a site testing tool, which lets you try different variations on your site and test them on different visitors. You can use this to see what images/headlines/etc. work best.

9. Page Speed

Google wants your website to load as fast as possible. They want this to be a universal concept across the web, so that web users can flip through pages just as they could with a magazine. Page speed is good for you too, because it gives customers a positive experience. Google offers this resource to help.

10. YouTube Channel

Finally, keep an eye on Google's YouTube channel for interesting and useful videos. I would like to see a directory of Google's YouTube channels just like the blog directory, because they have quite a few different ones related to specific products, but there are still a lot of videos on the main one. You can also find links to some others if you check out the subscriptions on this one.

Google offers a great many tools and resources to its users, which is likely a big part of the reason the company has become as successful as it has. We have barely scratched the surface here, but from these alone, there is a good chance you can greatly impact the performance of your site and your ads, and as a result, your business.