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Search engines (like Google) gather their information by sending out spiders to navigate sites. A search engine spider is a fancy term for a computer program. What a spider does is read in the HTML of your main page. It grinds through the HTML (essentially a text file) looking for links to other pages. When it finds one, it opens that page, looks for the links it that HTML and so on. This way the spider goes from page to page, working its way through your entire site.
The spider reads in HTML and looks for HREF tags. The HTML code for linking a page is like this: Click Here. The text between the and tags (Click Here) is underlined and linked to the page inside the tag (linkedpage.html). This is strictly a mechanical operation. The spider looks to match to HREF characters.
Only by following these HREF tags does the search engine get an idea of the scope of your site. If, for any reason, the spider's progress is halted (it can't find any HREF tags to go to the next page) it will not “see” the entire site. Since big sites fare better than little ones, it is in your best interest to see to it your site can be navigated (or indexed) by search engine spiders.
One common mistake that stops spiders is Flash animating a site's navigation. Flash animated buttons and menus look great (they pop, light up, explode, drop in, have sound, etc.) but because they are inside the Flash program there are no HREF tags and the search engine spiders can't navigate the site. From the perspective of a spider the flash area of a site is a black hole. In terms of HTML an entire flash site is just one page - and a tiny, no information page at that. Since spiders don't see them Flash sites are dead on arrival with site engines.
To succeed with search engines see to it that spiders can get into every corner of your site by finding HREF tags in your HTML. Flash sites look great, but they will NEVER achieve any notoriety with search engines. And if people can't find you, what's the point?
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