Google’s Webmaster Tools is a good place to begin …
Is there a better place to learn about good search engine optimization than the search engines themselves? Probably not.
Google’s Webmaster Tools is a good place to begin, so I’ll provide a quick summary of what Google offers and encourage you to visit and use the tools yourself.
Here’s a link to Google’s Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps.
Before using Google’s tools you must have a Google Account.
Once you have an account and login to the Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to add your site(s) by entering the domain into the Add Site field and clicking the OK button.
After adding your website, you’ll be asked to verify your site which you’ll do by uploading a HTML file with a specific, unique name you receive from Google or by adding a meta tag to page headers. The easiest for me was to create the HTML verification file and upload it ot my seb server. After uploading the uniquely named HTML file, you merely click the “Verify” button.
After you’ve added your web site and verified it, you can log off and wait for Google to visit. After that happens, you can log in to your Google account and see the results of the visit. You’ll have access to three sets of tools; Diagnostic, Statistics, and Sitemaps.
The Diagnostic tools include a summary of the web crawl of your site, a list of any crawl errors, an analysis of your robots.txt file, you can manage your site verification, adjust your site’s crawl rate, the ability to set a preferred domain for your site, and the option of choosing enhanced image search for your website.
The Statistics tools include crawl stats, query stats, page analysis, and index stats.
Finally, the Sitemaps tool is the interface you use to submit your sitemap to Google. Of course it’s only my opinion and I’ll right more later about it, but the nicest sitemap tool I’ve found is the GSiteCrawler by SOFTplus. Not only does it create Google-compliant sitemaps, it also generates Yahoo! urllist.txt files.
So, if you want to see how Google sees your site, explore Google’s Webmaster Tools. It’s a great place to begin your SEO work.