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.

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.

Choosing Bad Keywords

Anyone can rank well for bad keywords, but the real trick is ranking for popular keywords that will bring traffic to your site. So do your keyword research and don’t pick obscure or unpopular keywords. You may rank for “Canon SLR d300 buy at Hopkins”, but if no one searches for the term, then what good is ranking for it?

Nondescript Anchor Text

Google uses anchor text to navigate around your site.  Avoid unimaginative anchor text such as ‘Click here’ and ”Read More’ as they do not describe your pages in a way that is descriptive. Try to use them as imaginatively as possible for example, for a link to a holiday review use text like ‘Read our Monaco Hotels Review’, not ‘Monaco Review’

Writing for Google instead of your Readers

This is a real waste. In the early years of the internet writhing for search engines worked a charm and you could guarantee front page listings for your targeted keywords. Search engines are more sophisticated these days and can easily spot text written solely for web crawler consumption and will penalise sites that try this trick. Instead, write content that will engage your readers and make them return. This may sound repetitive, but it is the only thing that really works in the long run.

Not keeping track of your SEO

This is one of those tasks that often gets forgotten in the drive to push your site to the top of the organic listings. Every time you make changes to the site or add articles, it is very instructive to see the effectiveness of these changes. Tracking your SEO will show you the road to better traffic and organic listings and what works for your site.

Not keeping your site Accessible

Keeping your site accessible is a critical consideration because your site should be navigable to all users including those visually impaired and hearing difficulties. Always make your link text as descriptive as possible and make sure you fill in your alt tags for your images. Other considerations are how your site behaves when a user increases the font size. Will this cause overflow problems? Have you tested this on all the main browsers?

Failing to have a SEO plan

This is always hard to do, epically for newcomers who just want to dive headlong into the world of SEO. Pace your strategy and mark out important waypoints along the way. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

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.