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 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.