Perhaps the title of this article should be:

Do you agree that using Google services helps your website’s search placement?

Although I haven’t seen substantiated, written evidence of my theory, many web developers and professional communicators share my perspective — that when you use Google webmaster tools on your site, you’re adding Google juice that benefits your site’s page rank and search placement.

Here are a few Google tools I recommend all websites utilize:

Google Search

Even if you have a relatively small site with only a few dozen pages, incorporating Google Search on your website is a good idea.

If for no other reason than having Google index your site, it’s a good idea.

But it’s also a good idea from the perspective of usability. Is it easy for people to navigate your site and locate information? Even if you think it is, have you done usability focus group studies to determine if that’s really the case?

Why not add Google Search, a free tool, to help your site visitors fine what they’re looking for faster?

And if you don’t like the paid ads that show up in search results, pay the $100 a month for the Google Custom Search Business Edition to remove them.

Google Analytics

As communicators you’ve got to measure your efforts to show which direction the needle’s moving.

Google Analytics provides a pretty good, basic understanding of website traffic and referring sources.

You can use Analytics to compare your online activity with offline campaigns like sales, an advertising push or articles that may appear in the media or blogosphere about your product or service.

Are there correlating peaks and valleys? Is there no correlation?

These are important considerations in our day of integrated marketing communication.

Google FeedBurner

This is one of my favorite tools, especially now that they’ve added Socialize to the FeedBurner add-ons. You can read what I wrote about the Socialize plugin last month.

FeedBurner takes your native feed and puts it on steroids. It allows people to easily and quickly add your feed to their RSS reader, regardless of which reader they’re using. It also allows the reader to choose to receive your feed in their email inbox (its most valuable feature in my opinion).

FeedBurner has a host of additional plugins that allow you to add a logo to the feed and control how the feed subscriber can interact with and share your feed.

Since a key Web strategy is making your content portable and sharable among social networks, it’s almost a no-brainer for you to use FeedBurner.

Google XML Sitemap for WordPress

And for those of you who use WordPress to drive your site or blog, be sure you’re using the Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin.

Others?

Those are my favorite Google tools. Do you have others you think should be a priority?

Resources

And if you care to learn more, I highly recommend you spend some time on the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube.

You’ll probably learn more than you ever wanted to know.

I’m a big proponent of Google services. Any time you can give your site Google juice, it’s a good, healthy thing.

Recently FeedBurner, a Google service, announced the addition of a tool called Socialize.

FeedBurner Socialize automatically publishes your content to the social Web, in particular, Twitter.

I’m also a big proponent of efficiency and automating publishing when possible, instead of manually re-publishing or posting links.

Here’s how FeedBurner’s Socialize works:

In your FeedBurner account, go to the Publicize tab.

The sixth option down on the left is for Socialize – Publish to the social web.

You can add Twitter accounts (any number of them), and then associate a specific account with that particular feed. I have associated a number of feeds with my main Twitter account (@codella) because the feeds all have to do with my marketing and public relations consultancy business (which is what I use that Twitter account for).

Now, every time I publish a blog, the Google FeedBurner Socialize service automatically sends an update to Twitter with my blog post title and a Google-shortened link.

Here’s an example:

You’ll notice that Google was three minutes faster publishing an update in Twitter than I was. I manually posted a link through Tweet Deck to my blog article, but the FeedBurner Socialize service beat me to the punch by a few minutes.

In fact, it was even re-tweeted before I published the link in Twitter to the blog post.

Google also makes the Socialize tool available through its Google Toolbar application.

I like that Google has entered the URL shortening business. They provide good analytics and you know that URLs shortened by Google won’t one day stop working. At least if Google does stop working then we may as well not even have the Internet.