Cast your net wiiiide March 12
When I set up a new site usually one of the most important design considerations is making the site as appealling to search engines as possible. One aspect of this is allowing the SE to reach all parts of the site - which often means having one set of navigation menus for human visitors, and another for the SEs.
A great example of this is http://realestate.com.au. The homepage is designed for humans - but a search engine can’t fill out suburb drop-downs or submit forms, so if this was the only way to view houses, then the SEs would be locked out of all the content. So they have another set of pages which expose all the content in a way that SEs can read:
http://www.realestate.com.au/realestate/homes+for+sale/vic/melbourne+city
This page lists all the homes for sale in Melbourne City, and there are simple HTML links to all the other states/suburbs etc. Now the SEs can see everything.
Something a little more advanced
Some sites are just fancy front-ends for information provided by someone else (eg Mashups). Imagine you have a small site that allows people to find certain photos on Flickr. Wouldn’t it be great to add extra content to your site everytime a visitor used your service? Heres how:
Add a page to your site called ‘PreviousSearches’ and post a link from your homepage to this page.
Capture the visitor’s query, and add an html link on the ‘PreviousSearches’ page that brings up the same results as the original query. Make sure to use descriptive text in the link.
Eg: if the query was - ‘red cars in England’, make sure the anchor text is something like:
/red-cars-in-England.html
And make sure the title of the results page is similarly descriptive.
Code the ‘PreviousSearches’ page so that when it has 50 or so links that it clears the page and adds the old searches to ‘PreviousSearches-1′ and then 2, etc.
Be sure to add some of your own text on the results page so that you aren’t caught in the dupe content filter, and there you go! Heaps of new content for your site.