So you've redesigned your site but the pages haven't been found by search engines yet. What can you do to help speed up the process?

You should be using a sitemap: http://www.sitemaps.org. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site so that the site can be more accurately crawled by search engines. Here is an example file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

Even better news is that you can specify the sitemap in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Google, Microsoft Live, and Ask.com allow you to add your sitemaps using their Webmasters Tools site:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

http://webmaster.live.com/

Add a site to Ask.com http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http//www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Adding a site the site the traditional way still works but can take more time:

Add a site to Yahoo http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Add a site to Google http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add a site to DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/add.html