Hi,

would like to know if there are any basic tricks that is common knowledge when it comes to getting crawled by google and other engines.

For example.

- My site is a php script, is that a problem?
- Does meta tags still matter?
- How important is it that my index page contain relevant keywords and should they appear more than once?
- Is it possible to make the engine show a good description, it wont show my meta description.

Any good guides around? And I'm not interested in reading 15 pages.. just a couple of good suggestions :)

Best way to get a better rank is to get links.

By that i don't mean creating a link farm like spam sites do, but getting your site listed on some big sites that would have a bigger rank. Thier influence if you could call it that would rub off on your site.

The most simplest way to do it is to add a link to your site in signatures (like mine below) etc and get the word out.

Apart from that, another way to increase your rank is to have seach engine friendly URLs. By that i mean http://www.example.com/this/is/a/clean/url instead of http;//www.example.com/index.php?page=dirty/url.

Hope this helps

Oki thanks, I was suspecting that my php scripts was kinda dirty :)

Thanks.

Yep get as many link as possible, and you could also try starting ablog too. the searchengines love to spider blogs with updated content. Try blogger.com or similar for free.

>> - My site is a php script, is that a problem?

No should not be a problem.

>> - Does meta tags still matter?

Yes and no. They won't help you if you stuff them with irrelevant keywords. They do help slightly with Yahoo. Just add them but don't spend too much time on them. The most important tag on your page is the title tag

>> - How important is it that my index page contain relevant keywords and should they appear more than once?

Yes, the index page should contain relevant keywords in the content of your page (not in the meta tags).

>>- Is it possible to make the engine show a good description, it wont show my meta description.

If you are talking of Google, it would pick up the description from your content.

HTH