You may be hiding if the search engines cant see all of your sites relevant content.

Youve invested a great deal of time and effort carefully crafting compelling, helpful website content for prospective customers. Its well written and contains the appropriate keyword phrases that prospects will likely use when searching for this type of information on the Internet.

For some reason, though, the search engines seem to be ignoring this great content, and youre missing an opportunity to bring well-targeted traffic to your site. The problem may be that your Website isnt as friendly to the search engines as it might be.

In the audio book, Sound Advice on Search Engine Optimization, author Jill Whalen says, Youd be surprised how much content is buried deep within Websites that the search engines simply cant find.

Search engines discover and index Web pages using software called spiders. Spiders crawl from one page to another via the plain text or graphical links that connect them. Organizing your Website properly can improve the chances that the search engines and ultimately your customers will find all of your sites pages.

If youve got great content and want to share it with the world, youll have to make sure that your site is spider-able.

This is where a sitemap page can come in handy. A sitemap is like a table of contents. Create a sitemap that links to all the major categories of your site, says Whalen. Make sure you link to the sitemap from your homepage. For larger sites, the sitemap may need to be a directory of sorts, and possibly even be multiple pages.

If you want the search engines and your customers to find your Web pages, Whalen says, Feed those spiders what they want through your sitemap, and youll have half the battle won!

Jill Whalen offers search engine marketing strategy advice each week in the free audio newsletter from Whats Working in Biz, http://www.whatsworking.biz/full_story.asp?ArtID=92