Do most search engines look at the code of the website or what you see on the site itself? I'm guessing both depend on the search engine?

Content is key.

Make sure you have plenty of relevant and regularly updated content and you will be most of the way there.

And code can provide context for SEs. For example, keywords enclosed in <title> tags will carry more weight than paragraph text. <h*> tags have a slight edge too (as they should). Semantic validity can definitely give you an edge with SEs, and it's even more important for users, particularly those browsing with devices meant to aid people with disabilities.

There's really no reason you can't optimize both. You really should...

Well here is the situation, I'm using Yahoo! store and they use their code <yahoo id=blah> so it pulls info from the database so I'm curious to know if it is okay to use the yahoo code or to use text instead for SEO.

Assuming this is some sort of XML application, browsers will safely see this and SEs will ignore it. You shouldn't be penalized for it though. Concentrate on using the right text instead.

Well I believe I can either insert the yahoo code or text by using their dreamweaver plugin. The problem with using text is if I change let's say the description in the database I have to go in manually and change it in the html page instead of it workign dynamically (right word?). If SE work by looking at code I might be forced into using text instead of yahoo's code which I think in the long run would be a big hassle.

No worries there. When the page is parsed, SEs should see all they need. Check through the resulting page and see if Yahoo uses things like headers and appropriate titles and such. If so, that will help slightly, but as long as you're seeing text, the tags surrounding it shouldn't matter.

Sounds encouraging. But let me clarify a little. I can use dreamweaver to create the html documents so I add my own headers and titles. The way yahoo works is they have a catalogs page where you can manage your items. In this page, you add an item, price, description, etc and it adds the item to the database.

Example:

I have an item and the descrption is:
This red, white, and blue flag was created in 1957.

So instead of having to type that in my html document I put this code in the html document:

<!--yahoo store=124 id=flag description --> So this will query the database and return the description from above.

So what I'm trying to figure out is if the SE will parse what yahoo returns from the database or will it just look at my code and see <!--yahoo store=124 id=flag description -->?

The SEs see the end product only. It doesn't care what happens on the server. Look at your site's code after you've pulled it up in a browser. This is what the SEs will see. Assuming <!--yahoo store=124 id=flag description --> has been replaced with the appropriate content, that content will be viewed and indexed.

Thanks that's the exact info I was looking for. Now to read more about SEO. :)

Here are 2 good sites with tons of resources on SEO:

searchengineworld.com
seochat.com

And this site provides many free useful tools for your SEO needs:

digitalpoint.com/tools/

Enjoy!

Hey thanks a lot for the links! I'm sure the information will be very useful.