SEO Best Practices Part 10

When your site is ready

Submit your site to search engines

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Sitemap

Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your Web pages.

Examine your site

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Browser compatibility

Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Validation

Validate your page/site (Ctrl+Shift+a in Firefox). Validation errors will sometimes stop the spider from crawling your site fully and efficiently.

Webmaster tools

• see which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
• upload an XML Sitemap file
• remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
• specify the preferred domain
• identify issues with title and description meta tags
• understand the top searches used to reach a site
• get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
• remove unwanted site links that Google may use in results
• receive notification of quality guideline violations and file for a site reconsideration