Sitemaps are like a roadmap of your site for searchengines. It is an XML file that contain all the information a search engine needs to crawl your site. Creating one can be problematic but there are a large number of vendors that will provide the service for free.

I use and recommend gsitecrawler.com. Go to their site and download the software and install on your computer. Enter the URL of the site you want to generate a sitemap for and gsitecrawler will follow every link on you site. You also have the option of automatically uploading the sitemap to your site. The sitemap, once generated, is placed in a nominated directory on your computer ready for uploading.

Upload the site map to the top level folder of your site i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and inform the search engines where it is. There are a number of ways to do this. You could add a line to to your robots.txt file like this – sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
This will inform the search engines where your sitemap is.

Another way is to inform the search engines directly by pinging them.Here are the addresses:

google

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

yahoo

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

(Replace Domain.come above with the domain of your site)

Another highly recommended way is to sign up to each of the search engines webmaster portals. These are www.google.com/webmasters/tools/, https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/, and http://webmaster.live.com.

Once you start to get your pages indexed in the search engines, your on the way to effective SEO.

We all know how important it is to get good rankings on Google and Yahoo. No matter whether you want to outsource your SEO or do it yourself, it is essential to know what not to do as well as what to do. So, without further adieu, here are the most common SEO mistakes that you must avoid at all times.

Link Spamming

This is poison for your site. OK, you’ll have thousands of links, but not quality links. Google loves links if they are authoritative but will penalise you if you have loads of crap pointing to your site. Forget the business of getting thousands of links to your site. Spend your time instead enhancing your site and you will be much better off in the long run.

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If you haven’t heard, google has been updating their indexing of websites lately. This does not affect the page rank of your site, but it is having a drastic effect on some unsuspecting sites traffic. Many sites are experiencing a free fall in their rankings to a point where their business’ are been wiped out.

Google does this if believes that a site has been naughty in it’s marketing techniques. It is not just spam sites that google now targets, but any site could become victim of the google curse.

How do you know if your site is a victim of this latest round of blood-letting? Check your index stats in the google search engine “site:yoursite.com”, and do a search for your targeted keywords in google. If you find a dramatic drop in your rankings or index pages, then the almighty google has purged your site.

This seems to be happening to the most unsuspecting sites. I have heard from Eamonn, the webmaster of telcojobs.eu, that overnight all his marketing efforts since he started the site have been for nought. “I noticed my traffic was way down this morning, but when I checked my keywords, they were nowhere to be seen!” said Eamon. “I’ve been working solid with article marketing for 6 months and now it’s down the tubes”.

It is the sort of news that makes a webmasters’ blood run cold or wake you in the night in a screaming cold sweat. I suppose the moral of the story here is never entrust you websites success in the hands of the google gods. Always look for diverse traffic from many different sources like banner ads, social networking and the other search engines like MSN and yahoo.

So, what do you do if your site is slammed by google? Well, you might have to bite your tongue and follow googles own guidelines.

Determine whether your site is still in our index – site:www.yoursite.com
Verify your site ranks for your domain name – if it ranks poorly in the results, then google probably has penalised you. if this is the case, then you will be sent an explaination to the Message Center area in your webmaster tools, if you have set one up.
Request Reconsideration – This will allow to post a rant directly to google, but your probably better off banging your head off a brick wall as it can take many weeks for google to respond. And don’t expect the gods to lift their curse.

If you need a quick SEO analysis of your site, then Website Grader is a superb tool. Over on Digital Point forums, some people offer this kind of service for a donation where the URL that is analyzed simply gets fed into this site.

Simply enter your URL, and wait for the results which will be very helpful in getting your site on the right track at least.

You can also enter the URL of a competing site to see how you match up. You will get a full report on On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, how you rank on the blogosphere and a load of other stuff.

Try it! Just go to http://www.websitegrader.com and see how your site ranks.

This is by far the most used firefox extension I have. With a simple mouse click, I can evaluate a websites PR, its alexa rating, backlinks, Y! Links, edu links and see if it is dmoz listed. Although there are lots of SEO tools available, this one wins hands-down for its ease and simplicity. You can find the plugin here.

Once installed you’ll find the SEO icon above installed on the bottom right of your firefox browser. Click to activate the plugin, then on any webpage your browsing, right-click, select ‘Seo for Firefox’, then ‘Lookup this page’ to get a quick look at all the seo information for that page like the capture on the left. the figures here are an evaluation of google.

The two most important values are Page rank. These range from 0-10. Anything 3+ is respectable, but too much emphasis is placed on page rank these days. Some sites may have little or no traffic, but still receive a high PR.

A better metric on SEO for firefox is alexa.  This measures the traffic on the site you are evaluating. The lower the value, the better traffic going through that site e.g. Facebook has an alexia rank of 5, but the scale can rise to millions. So if your site has an alexa rank of 90,000, then your site is <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} span.EmailStyle15 {mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:windowtext;} @page Section1 {size:595.3pt 841.9pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

effectively the 90,000th best site on the net!