You can in addition find out how many links there are to your site and where they’re from, you can find out if there have been any crawl errors. You can learn all about your internal links and statistics for your subscribers. A section under the “Labs” menu helps you gauge your site performance and walks you through installation of the Page Speed add-on for Firefox that gathers all kinds of data on how fast your page loads and what, if anything, you can do to make it load faster. This tool is likely to get some miles on it now that site speed has been added into the mix of things that determines website ranking.

Seriously, if you have a free or slow afternoon at work one day, you should go through each of the Webmaster tools and find out stuff about your site you might never have known.

Having a sitemap is beneficial for a number of reasons besides the easier indexing of your site. A sitemap makes it easy for visitors to navigate the site, gets across the site’s general theme, and helps you, the webmaster stay on top of how your site is organized so that when you add new pages you can place them optimally within the sitemap, or else modify the sitemap to accommodate the new pages.

Some blog hosts, like Google’s Blogger, automatically create a sitemap for blogs started there. For other websites, there are a number of free online web tools that help you create a sitemap. One is http://tools.lilengine.com/sitemap-builder/, and another is http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp. If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, then you should make one and submit it to the major search engines. It will improve your site’s quality and rankings by helping bots and humans find their way around your site more easily.