Bots and crawlers don't access databases - ever. If they did, all hell would break loose across the globe and world war three would probably ensue. What they do (and it's all that they do) is Read html rendered pages. The reason changing the CMS records works is because alongside that there will be an engine that gets the content of the CMS database and renders it as HTML. Wordpress is a classic example, so is Visual Studio and a host of others.
You can of course always access the mysql tables directly from an html page using asp.net, javascript or PHP. As long as you don't actually change anything (there are dire warnings in the AIM reference manual about changing things outside of AIM). There's probably even a Wordpress plugin somewhere that will take the pain of development away and do it for you.
So, to sum up. You need a public facing website and some code to access your tables and render the content in html. Then all you've got to do is get the search engines to visit you.
Be careful what you expose. Bad bots ignore robots.txt files. If you call up one of your AIM app pages and right mouse button and then View Page source (I'm using Safari so the wording might be different in other browsers) THAT's what the bot sees.
I seem to recall (though I've never tried it) that you can do guest logins in AIM without having to enter a business space, user name or password. If this is the case and you can get to a screen without any user intervention (which would stop the bot) then what you expose is what the bot will see. Might work?
