·        Tools WordTracker & Good Key Words

·        Determining What Is A Viable Website

·        Search Engine Friendly URL

·        Flow Chart-Categories

·        Search Engine Friendly Design

o       Spider Friendly Navagation

o       Text Relevancy And Optimization,

o       Graphics & Descriptive Alt Tags

o       Descriptive URLS And Folder Names 

o       HTML Placement Is A Spiders Road Map

o       It is best to think of the search engine spiders using a browser with far less abilities than any browser you own. One nice way of getting an idea of how well your site can be spidered by the search engines would be to download a copy of Mosiac 

o       Density Analyzer

o       Web Bells and Whistles 

o       Frames 

o       Referrers and Keywords 

o       Flash

o       Submission 

It is important to remember to create your site so the bots can read and understand your information. If the bots cannot understand your website, then they have little or nothing to return to the index. Here are some helpful tips to understand what "bot food" your site should provide:

1.           All search engines use the "Location Frequency Method." This means that they look at the text closest to the top (location) of the page and how often text is repeated (frequency). Your title and header tags are very important tags and should always contain your most popular key phrases. Try to avoid using large images and scripting at the top of your pages as this pushes the most important elements of your page (the text) to the bottom.

2.           Know what key phrases you should use on each page. Key phrases are terms you know that your target market will use to search on you. Sometimes the terms you think people would use to find you are not always the best ones; you should test this to find the best key phrases. Once you know the terms, use them in the title and header tags, placed them in named links, and repeat them within the text of the page. You should optimize each page on your site for a specific key phrase.

3.           Bots cannot read images or image maps. If you have created a site that is basically all images with very little text, you will not do well in search queries compared to sites that have relevant text. Remember that bots are "text hungry" - that is what they need to determine the overall theme of your site. You can use ALT tags on your images, and they are important for many reasons, but have very little weight on the overall "ranking" process of the search engine.

4.           Avoid the use of frames. Search engine bots will index each of your pages individually, not within the frameset. So all your internal pages become "orphaned" and people cannot navigate your website unless each page has a link back to "home." Also, Inktom, may even ignore your site all together if it is in a frameset tag.

5.           Avoid the use of "Flash Only" or  "Image Only" websites. Most bots choose not to read Flash, so they see little text or relevant information to determine your website's theme. Meta tags in Flash can help, but are usually not enough to help you rank well in the commercial search engines.

6.           Use meta tags within the head tag of your document. These are not really helpful anymore to commercial search engines because many just ignore them now.

7.           Do not lock your links in images and _JavaScript. If you use rollover images for the main navigation of your site, the bot may not be able to understand how to travel through your website. All bots follow HTML links, but lack the ability to determine links in Java, _JavaScript, Flash, etc. If you have your links trapped in images or _JavaScript, Flash, or Java, you will need to provide text links at the bottom of your pages to the most important information on your site so that the bots can find and index it.

8.           Dynamic websites (ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, ASP.NET and JAVA) have difficulty being indexed by bots. Any urls with a "?" in them are a potential problem to search engine bots. They may not follow url's with special characters and therefore will not index the website. Google is the only search engine that to some extent can effectively index dynamic websites.

9.           For fun, the bots have been given names by their engineers. Inktomi bot is called "Slurp," Google's bot is called "Googlebot", Lycos' bot is called T-Rex, and Altavista's bot is called Scooter, to name just a few. Bots tend to return about once a month; so it may take a while for your changes to show up in a search.