SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an effective promotional strategy which helps enhance your web site’s traffic from regular (not Pay Per Click) search results. But how do you know when your site is in need of SEO work? Here is a list of possible indications:

1.) When your traffic mostly comes from non-search sources and/or PPC listings: This isn’t necessarily a problem, but using SEO will provide you with more stability and diversification in traffic sources, as well as an increase in overall hits.

2.) When you don’t have a Site Map and/or don’t know if your site can be navigated by search engine spiders/robots: If your site’s pages can’t be indexed by search engines, they won’t appear in results. Part of SEO is making sure the site is designed in a way which allows for this.

3.) When no SEO work has been conducted on the website for a long period of time: Search engines eventually change some of their policies, and different engines become more or less popular, so a site which was well optimized for them ten years ago is probably using some outdated techniques by now.

4.) When you plan to eventually resell a web site: Being able to say that your site is search engine optimized and pointing to specific search keywords it shows up under (or a high Google PageRank) will help increase your site’s resale value substantially.

5.) When your costs from other advertising methods are too expensive: SEO offers a more long-term solution to gaining web traffic, in contrast to continually paying for each impression or click on your links. This allows you to escape monthly or weekly promotional expenses.

6.) When you have a low Google PageRank: This ranking (PR) assigned by Google is a useful indication of whether or not a site has enough quality, relevant links pointing to it. If it is low (especially below three), efforts should be made to increase the number of inbound links it has.

You may even want to begin SEO efforts before creating and launching a web site; if the web pages incorporate SEO into their design and content from the beginning, they won’t require changes later on, nor will they be disadvantaged in search results until such changes are made.

After creating an XML sitemap for your web site, you can submit it to major search engines so that they will index the pages sooner and update the search listings for them more frequently. However, the procedure for submitting sitemaps varies significantly from one search engine to the next. Here are some details on how to submit your sitemap to four of the major search engines…

To submit your new sitemap to Microsoft’s Live Search, which provides results for both Live.com and MSN.com, first go to webmaster.live.com. Then click on the “Sign in to use the tools” button, and sign in (after registering, if necessary) with your Windows Live ID. A form titled “Add a website” will appear, where you can enter the addresses of your sitemap and homepage.

Submitting a sitemap to Yahoo is somewhat different. The easiest way to get to the correct page (which has already changed its URL at least once) is to go to Yahoo.com, then search for “submit sitemap”. Click the first result (”Yahoo! Site Explorer”) and scroll down to “Submit Site Feed.” The list below it shows that sitemaps are one type of “feed” which can be submitted using that form. You will have to log in, or register for a Yahoo account if you haven’t already.

Sitemaps can also be submitted to Google, if you register for an account there and log into Google Webmaster Tools. After logging in and reaching the “dashboard”, click the “sitemaps” tab on the menu at the left-hand side of the screen. Then click one of the two “Add Sitemap” links and select the appropriate map type from the next menu. The webmaster tools area can be accessed at google.com/webmasters/tools/.

You can submit your sitemap to Ask.com as well. According to their FAQ for webmasters, a “ping URL” may be used for this purpose. This URL is “http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=”, with the URL of your XML sitemap added to the end of it. An alternative option they suggest is to put the “auto-discovery directive” for sitemaps in your web site’s robots.txt file.

Other search engines, such as GigaBlast and ScrubTheWeb, don’t appear to offer any method to specifically submit a sitemap. However, you can still submit your web site’s home page to them. Still others (like Altavista and Lycos) get their results from other major search engines, so it isn’t necessary to submit anything to them separately.

If you have a large site with lots of different pages and target links then you should have a sitemap for it. A site map is similar to a table of contents in that it allows people to see an abbreviated version of what’s available on your website.

To create your site map the first step you’ll want to take is laying out all the pages and necessary target links in a word-processing program or on a sheet of paper. During this step you may want to visit some of the websites you are familiar with or like the layout of. Look at their sitemaps for ideas on how to organize your own.

Next, you’ll have to open a text-editing program like Notepad. Using this program open the webpage where your sitemap will be located or create a new page for the sitemap. Copy and paste, or manually enter, the sitemap you created previously into the place you want it on the webpage. Insert the links to each referenced page or target link. Save the page and preview it in a browser, checking to make sure all the links work. Once you’ve verified they all do, upload the page to your website and recheck the links.

Some web design programs like Macromedia Dreamweaver have built-in commands for creating a sitemap. You can check the help section for instructions. If it still seems too difficult to create a sitemap on your own you can purchase products such as Site Map Pro to help create the sitemap you need.

Many people that have blogs today run them using WordPress. WordPress fortunately has a few plugins that can help optimize your blog for search engines. Here is a little more information about five those plugins.

1.    SEO Title Tag allows you to optimize the title tags in your WordPress blog. Since title tags are quite important in SEO this plugin is also important. You can override a post or page title tag with a custom version as well as reverse the order of the blog name and the title making your post’s title more SEO efficient.
2.    Head Meta Description lets you add dynamic meta descriptions automatically. It uses the first few words from your post though so put your important keywords in early.
3.    The Ultimate Tag Warrior lets you include your tags as Meta Keywords in the header of tag pages and single post pages.
4.    The All-in-One SEO Pack allows you to define your home page title, description and keywords, use categories for meta keywords, avoid indexing of duplicate content and autogenerate descriptions.
5.    Google Sitemap Generator creates a Google compliant sitemap of your blog. Google sitemaps are important because they can help you get indexed by Google.

Using these five plugins can really help your blog returned higher in search engine results. But, you still need lots of unique content that is updated frequently and is relevant to your market. Otherwise Google and the other search engines won’t care how well you optimize.

The Google Sitemap Protocol allows a webmaster to tell Google about URLS on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an file that lists all of the available URLs for a site. It also provides web site owners the ability to put additional information about each URL: the time and date it was last updated, how often the content of the web page changes, and how important the web page is in relation to other URLs that belong to the site. In short, the Google Sitemap Protocol provides an easy way for search engines, primarily Google, to crawl the site more intelligently.

The Google Sitemap Protocol is particularly beneficial in situations when it is difficult for users to access all areas of a website through the browseable interface. For example, a site with a large “archive” or “database” of resources that aren’t well linked to each other (if at all), only accessible via a search form.

The webmaster can generate a sitemap using the Google Sitemap Protocol containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. For dynamically created sites or web sites using Flash or AJAX, the Google Sitemap Protocol may be the only way to get the website fully indexed.

Note that the Google Sitemap Protocol is only a supplement to other search engine submission processes and does not in any way replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting a sitemap using Google Sitemap Protocol to a search engine a webmaster is only helping that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site(s).

Using the Google Sitemap Protocol does not guarantee that your web site pages will be included in search engine indexes nor does it influence the way that your web site pages are ranked by a search engine.

After a sitemap is submitted via Google account, Google provides current crawler problem reports after a simple verification procedure to ensure only the web site owner gets access to the stats area.

There are several free online Google Sitemap Protocol Tools that will generate a Google Sitemap for your web site:
GSiteCrawler (Windows)
Tipue (Windows)
Sorrowmans Sitemap Protocol Tools (Windows)
Site Map Pro $ (Windows)
AllWebMenus $ (Windows)
GWebCrawler & Sitemap Creator $ (Windows)
CoffeeCup Sitemapper $ (Windows)
Gsitemap (Windows)
PHP XML Sitemap Generator $ (Windows)
MediaCET Diadematus (Windows)
Odin Assemble $ (Windows)
Rage Google Sitemap Protocol Automator $ (OSX)
Map-IT Sitemapper $ (Windows, Mac)
GoogleSitemapsWin (Windows)
Devintelligence Sitemap Protocol Generator (Windows)
G-Mapper (Windows)
IntelliMapper (Windows)
GY SiteMapper (Windows)
Site Magellen(Windows)
A1 Sitemap Generator $ (Windows)

These Google Sitemap Protocol tools will help you generate your Google Sitemap.