Did you know that search engine spiders frequently skip many of the interior pages when they crawl larger sites? Especially if those pages are more than one level down from the root directory of a site, the spiders often ignore them.

One traditional method of overcoming this has been to submit every page of a site to the major search engines, but that can be terribly time consuming if you do it by hand, or expensive if you employ a service to do it for you.

Bloggers and webmasters are creative folks, though, and some have come up with a new strategy to use blogs to get a website fully spidered. As far as I know, this strategy was invented, or at least has been popularized by, a fellow by the name of Rick Butts. He calls it the "Blog and Ping" strategy.

Frankly, I find this a little controversial, as it suggests that you create a blog for the sole purpose of getting another website indexed by the search engines. On the other hand, if you have a good reason to have a blog, and can "deep link" it to your main website with legitimate posts, then this can be a great strategy to get some of those hidden interior pages indexed.

Here's how it works. You establish a blog whose theme is relevant to the theme of your main website. I guess it doesn't absolutely have to be relevant, but that would sure help, as I see it. This is a linking and SEO strategy, and search engines show preference for relevant links.

Anyway, once you have your blog set up, you activate the RSS feed, and get it listed in Yahoo. In addition, you need to make sure that you're set up to ping weblogs.com every time you post a new entry to your blog. Personally, I like to use PingOmatic too.

The easiest way to do this is to set this blog up at Blogger.Com. You can host it anywhere, but hosting at Blogger.Com pretty much ensures quick and repeated visits from the GoogleBot (Google now owns Blogger.Com).

OK, once you're set up, you're ready to "blog and ping". Post a couple of entries to the new blog to get the ball rolling. If you post daily for a week or two, you can be reasonably sure that both Google and Yahoo will have spidered your blog. Now it's time to rock and roll.

From this point on, you want your blog entries to contain "deep links" to the interior pages of the website you're trying to get spidered. A "deep link" simply refers to a link that goes straight to a specific page, rather than to the main page, which is the traditional target for links. Deep links target the hard-to-find interior pages.

Each day (or every few hours, if you're really energetic) you add a new post to your blog, and slip in as many of these "deep links" as you reasonably can.   In my opinion, the blog entries must be legitimate, and serve some useful purpose for your human visitors. That shouldn't be that difficult, however, if the theme of your blog is related to the theme of your website.

Some people think that you can implement this strategy without bothering about the content of your posts, but I, personally, am opposed to that.

I feel it amounts to sp*mming the search engines. To each his own, I guess ...

So what happens when you "blog and ping"? Well, as we all know, search engines love blogs because of their constantly freshened content, and the fact they are full of links. So the bots come crawling to your blog, and they follow the links that they find ... and follow the next set of links that they find at the pages you send them, to, etc, etc, until they get tired of it.

Since the bots are visiting your blog frequently, they're also visiting most, if not all of the pages of your site frequently, and you, as a result, get your whole site indexed much more quickly than you normally would.

NOTE: this does NOT get your pages ranked any better than they normally would! It just gets them indexed quickly. It's up to YOU to optimize the pages of your website, and get additional links to and from them, to get the high page rank we all desire.

The strategy does, however, get your site fully indexed, and gives you a chance to get lots more of your interior pages listed in the search results much more quickly than usual.

If you want to automate this entire process (at a price), visit Blog Burner, or visit the original blog to read more about this controversial strategy.

As I said several times above, I personally don't believe you should create and post to a blog just to get your website indexed. On the other hand, if you have a relevant blog, and have a legitimate reason for linking some of the posts to the interior pages of your site, this can be a very useful strategy.

Happy Blogging!