Back in the day, building a static site with Microsoft Frontpage software was almost universal.  You built a page, added it to your site, changed your sitemap to include the new page, then went out and promoted your new page.  You followed this process for every new page on your site - mind numbing hour after hour of linking, adding, promoting, repeating.

If you're still following this process, you need to stop now.  All of the heavy lifting has been done for you by companies that create content management systems - some free, some not - all very powerful.  My current CMS of choice is Wordpress - extremely powerful, constantly being improved, and has hundreds of plugins to help you with search engine optimization, subscriber management, and spam deflection. 

If you're still building by hand you should download Wordpress right now, install it, and give it a quick spin.