A sitemap page is a very good way of giving search engine robot every opportunity to reach your website pages. Since robots click through links of your web pages, make sure that at least your most important pages are included in sitemap; you may even want to include all your pages there, depending on size of your site. Be sure to add a link to sitemap page from each page on your site.

Another important consideration is that of keeping all of your pages within a small number of "clicks" from your top page. Many robots will not follow links more than two or three levels deep, so if your "widgets" page can only be reached from your home page by following multiple links (e.g. home page >> about us page >> products page >> widgets page), robot may not crawl deep enough to get to widgets page.

Testing Your Website For Search Engine Robot Accessibility To get an idea just what search engine robot "sees" on your page, you can look at Sim Spider tool. You may be surprised at how different your site looks to robot. You can find this tool at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

You will see text and ALT image text show up in results. If your entire website is built in Flash, you will see nothing at all because robots don't understand Flash movies.

The Bottom Line When it comes to search engine robots, think simply. Lots of good content and text, hyperlinks robots can follow, optimization of your pages, topical links pointing back to your site and a sitemap will help insure best results when robots come visiting.

Resources

SpiderSpotting - Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/spiders.html

Robotstxt.org List of robots and protocols for setting up a robots.txt file. http://www.robotstxt.org/

Spider-Food Tutorials, forums and articles about Search Engine spiders and Search Engine Marketing. http://spider-food.net/

Spiderhunter.com Articles and resources about tracking Search Engine spiders. http://www.spiderhunter.com/

Sim Spider Search Engine Robot Simulator Search Engine World has a spider that simulates what Search Engine robots read from your website. http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

Because you'll be updating your newsletter regularly, search engines will give you points for regularly updated content. Plus, your site will be continuously expanding, giving spiders new information to index with each visit. And, when you're posting each new issue, make sure it has a link back to your index page. As spiders go through new content, you might as well register another link to your homepage.

Some publishers go extra step of setting up a domain specifically for their ezine, separate from their regular website. If you feel you have enough content to support both (without duplicating your content), this might be something to consider. Just make sure you have time and energy to manage two separate sites as adding a new domain will take more time.

By focusing each issue of your newsletter on one or more of your keyword phrases, posting archives online, inviting webmasters to link to your newsletter archives, and keeping your newsletter updated, you'll find your rankings climbing. Go extra mile and set up a domain just for your newsletter and you may find yourself with two top ranked sites. As with any newsletter, remember, content matters most, whether your primary goal is more sales, or better search engine rankings.

You're already producing a newsletter. It’s definitely worth extra time training newsletter to multitask and to see your site climb in search engines.