The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 34. Google

Everyone knows about Google's search functions, but the company has a number of lesser-known yet extremely useful tools known as "Google Services."

Google Base allows you to submit any kind of data for inclusion in Google's search results. This can include items for sale, recipes, job descriptions, personal ads—literally anything.

You can include attributes to help people find your listings when they do relevant searches:

http://base.google.com/

If you have a lot of items to list for sale, you can use this software to create a "bulk upload" file in conformance with Google Base's API:

http://www.siteall.com/

Google Product Search is a product search engine—items that you submit via Google Base may appear in Google Product Search if they are relevant to the user's search:

http://www.google.com/products/

Google Webmaster Tools is a collection of tools designed to help you with several aspects of your web site, including:

Google Sitemaps for informing Google of content you want indexed

Google Analytics to analyze your site traffic and effectiveness

Google Optimizer for testing various elements of your web site (multivariate testing)

And more...

All of these tools are free, and some of these tools are comparable to commercial software costing thousands of dollars:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

In addition to the Google Sitemap generation tool provided by Google, here are three software tools for creating Google sitemaps:

http://www.sitemapdoc.com/

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/goog-sitemapgen ...