Google provides some nice tools they don't brag about. Here are three.

Google Site Submission Site submission is the easiest way to get googlebot crawling your site.

Google Sitemaps Google sitemaps is a hidden gem. Basically you submit generated sitemaps in XML format to google. When googlebot comes around again it use the sitemap, rather then the just the site index. Google sitemap also provides some sweet stats. One useful stat is the most common keywords that google sees in your content. When your ready to submit a site map there is an awesome sitemap generator called GSitemap Generator.

Google Analytics Google Analytics, the gem. Unfortunately you need both an account and an invitation; these invitations aren't like gmails classic invitations either. One must put in a request to google for an invitations and wait... Signing up is worth a shot, google analytics is like awstats on crack. Just imagine if google wrote awstats... Sign up.