I have broken up the article into several sections (posts) to better deal with each section more effectivelly, this section deals with search engine optimization.

This is not meant as an authoritative source, it provides you with a generalized guide that can be built upon.

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Search Engine Optimization

* Create short, descriptive page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your links.

* Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it directly from your homepage.

* Search engine robots will follow the link to your site map and will most likely add all your pages to the index.

* Decide what the two or three main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users will type to find your page) and repeat them often in your page title, description meta tag and page body.

* Create a Links page and call it Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have agreed to place a reciprocal link to your page. The more inbound links you have from quality sites with a topic related to your site, the better your site will rank with the search engines.

* Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor text and will crawl and index your site faster.

DMOZ provides a lot of search results for a good percentage of the most important search engines and directories, including Google. First, DMOZ is NOT a robot-driven crawler but rather a large, human-edited directory of the Web, submitting and getting accepted to DMOZ should get you higher exposure on other engines.

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I welcome additions that anyone feels are equally important to this list.

Thank you for your time in reading this post, and I sincerely hope this helps you in your quest for a better website.