First of all, you must ensure that your site is search engine friendly to begin with! If your site uses frames, then search engines will have difficulty in indexing your pages. There are workarounds but these are unsatisfactory. In a word, do NOT use frames!!!! If you are not sure what a frameset is, don't worry. Just tell your web designer NOT to use them! Tell him or her to use SSI (see earlier section on choosing a web host) instead for elements which are repeated across pages. Your web designer may wish to offer you a "database driven" site. There are valid reasons for building sites this way - they are often easier to update, and integrate more easily with shopping carts which will be database-driven. Don't worry about what this means. Just tell you web designer that if your site is database-driven, there should not be question marks appearing in the URL, and that the URLs should look "normal" and meaningful rather than be full of obscure characters. Ask your web designer to employ a technique known as "URL rewriting" to overcome this and deliver search engine friendly URLs. Bear in mind that database-driven sites may take longer to index by search engines than "flat html" sites but this should not be a major problem so long as your web designer understands search engine issues.

If your site uses Flash, search engines will not be able to index the content of your Flash pages. A Flash site may look wonderful but is useless for search en­ gines and annoys many users - especially those with a slow internet connec­ tion. It may also require users to install the latest version of Flash before they can view your beautiful website! Use Flash only selectively and do NOT use Flash for your home page!

You must also ensure that there is a set of text links to every page on your website, on, at the very minimum, your home page. When you submit your site to search engines you submit the domain name on its own, which means the search engine, will go to your (site root) home page (this is why framed sites don't work - the "home" page of a framed site is actually a frameset and has no content). If you have a Flash home page (which we do NOT recommend), you MUST place a set of text links in the HTML page in which the Flash movie is embedded. Don't use invisible links - if you want to hide them from the user, simply place them discretely at the foot of the page in a fairly small font.

Ideally, there should be a full set of links on every page, (or on a sitemap page which must be linked to from the home page). This means regularly updating the menu, laborious if you don't use server side includes (SSI) or a database- driven system for your menu. But be careful with the latter solution as data­ base-driven sites must be built carefully as search engines may not index their pages if they are constructed in a certain way.

Also, be careful about changing the file names or file extensions of your pages if they are already indexed in search engines. You can lose rankings quite easily this way. Search engines only "like" certain kinds of redirects (often called "301" redirects), and even here you still can lose what you have gained. Wherever possible use search engine friendly filenames for your webpages - these will produce search engine friendly URLs. In otherwords your url should look something like:

my-product.co.uk/this-product.shtml

rather than

mybusinessname.co.uk/thisproduct.shtml

Don't worry if you don't fully understand all the above issues. Just make sure that your web designer does! Show them this document if you wish.