A colleague of mine recently announced to me that he and a couple of his friends hired a software company to develop a web site for them. Curious as i am i visited the web site directly and started searching inside the code to find out which platform they used, if they have social integration, SEO tags etc. It turned out that none of these was present due the fact that it`s just a start up site, and the budget was not enough to cover for all of this. All ok but at least i think they should have added their newly created website to the webmaster tools of Google and Bing.
According to my opinion even if it is a start up site, you need to use webmaster tools to let Google and Hotmail know that you are already running, and so that they can start indexing the individual web pages you have. For that reason you need to create a sitemap file and place it on the root of the www. I usually name these files sitemap.xml and either create them by hand or by application modules (like in wordpress for example). Keep in mind that google needs to have an xml file as a sitemap and not a php page that would generate xml formatted text, not being able to find a solution to this yet.
The benefits are numerous. You can check your page in terms of structured data, linked pages, coding errors. You also can see different statistics of your web page such as inbound, outbound links as well as search queries. Google additionally also lets you see the indexing status of your submitted sitemaps as well as some keyword preference based on the submitted urls. Finally, on the relative submenu, you are able to monitor the google crawler as it crawls your web site for errors, and also be able to see how Google “reads” your web page, by using the “Fetch as Google” functionality.
Bing webmaster tools provides matching functionality, combining some “analytics” type data though. e.g SEO Analyzer, Link Explorer, Page Traffic etc.
Closing this, I strongly believe that creating a sitemap and adding it to Bing /Google webmaster tools is one of the first actions a webmaster should do, after going public. These are great tools that guarantee you that the big players in search engines can “see” you good.
SEO Must haves that apply to any web page
Update: Yandex also has a Webmaster Tool for their search engine. Check it out