Avoid common words
Avoid words which have a lot to do with the Internet in general. When a user searches for one of these words they get a huge number of results and yours is likely to be way down on the list.

Keyword phrases
These days there are so many pages on the Web that users usually search for strings of at least two or three related words at once, for example "keyboard video mouse switches". If you have all three words on your list separately, you'll be listed below somebody else's page if they've combined all three words together, in a keyword phrase. You might want to use the keywords "lotus, notes, lotus notes", where "lotus notes" is a keyword phrase.

Plurals
When you've completed your keywords list, add the letter 's' to the end of every word (or add the plural of the word to the list in the case of words like cactus/cacti). Many people search for "games" or "hotels" and if your keywords are in the singular your page won't be listed and your efforts will have been wasted.

Just say no to frames
A couple of the leading search engines claim that they follow links within framed sites, but there's still no evidence to support this. Keep in mind that even if they do, you can only get to your framed site with one URL and thus you can only have one listing on a search engine.

You could get around this by listing the URLs of your framed pages, but then you'd have to be prepared for people to arrive at your site via a full-screen page which should be framed, which kind of defeats the object of having frames in the first place. If you really must use frames, make good use of the <NOFRAMES> tag on your index page, so you'll at least have one decent listing.

Don't question (if you don't have to)
I have read numerous "pleas" and "gripes" up on the Domino forums on Notes.net, talking about how certain search engines won't index their Domino sites. Well, here's the secret: most search engine spiders won't index URLs that contain special characters, such as ampersand (&), percent sign (%), equals sign (=), dollar sign ($) or question mark (?). Why? Well, these characters are interpreted as CGI parameters, and spiders don't crawl CGI programs.

You Domino programmers will recognize that the ampersand (&) is used to pass query string variables to your scripts, like $$Return formulas and such. However, the question mark (?) is used to perform the Domino HTTP commands such as ?OpenForm, ?OpenView, ?OpenNavigator, etc. So, how do you get around this hurdle? Simple, don't use these parameters in your URL's!

So long as your forms, views, navigators and agents have unique names, you can reference them without needing the question mark (?) Open commands. Give it a try. Your search engines will thank you for it! A few caveats though: embedded or pasted graphics on your pages will automatically generate the URL reference to the image, which includes the ?OpenElement tag. The way around this is to manually build your image references, or to use an image library (let's save this for next time, shall we?). Also, searches, dynamic pages and other CGI-type calls will use the special characters that the search engines don't digest, so try to keep these pages deeper into your site.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.