Now that you have a site, and have submitted it to all the major search engines, you just need to sit back and wait for them to come visit your site. However, when they do come to your site, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find all your key data and web pages.
Start off by making a sitemap. A sitemap is basically a list of all the web pages on your site. It can be tricky to create your own, so for now you can use the automatic sitemap generator at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. This will work on any site that has less than 500 pages. You will be given a sitemap.xml file to download and then upload to your website. I’d also recommend you submit it to Google in the Webmaster Tools Sitemap section.
Once Google or Yahoo! come to your site, they will read this sitemap and have a list of all the main pages to crawl. If you don’t have a sitemap, the robots will have to discover all your pages itself, which could take a while.
It is also recommended that you name your web pages so that the name is relevant to the content of the page. For example, look at your address bar now. You will see the address of this blog post is http://yetanotherseoblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/helping-search-engines-find-your-content/
You will notice that the address is pretty much an explanation of what is contained on this page. This will help with your rankings as the page name will match the content. A bad example would be to have “page1.html” or “car.html” as both do not have relate to the content. They may not reduce your ranking but this is all about optimising. These tips will aid in doing so.
Another way to get robots to crawl your site is by getting inbound links from other sites.
