Most webmasters have visited Google's Webmaster Help Center: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters. Many of the suggestions are obvious: Don't use frames; Don't employ cloaking techniques or scripts designed to trick search engines; Create a search engine-friendly site map; Get incoming links from other quality web sites. But us webmasters can be a cocky bunch and will let our own pre-conceived notions get the better of us sometimes.

This refresher is for all you (ie. us) webmasters and search engine optimizers who have a set method of designing and/or promoting web sites and who consider yourselves experts in your field. Experts you may be, but it is never a bad idea to review the basics from time to time.

- Make sure your pages have less than 100 links. This won't be too difficult unless you display product lists without breaking them up into separate pages (which should be done for your visitors let alone search engines!) or have a link partners page or a site map. If you have more than 100 outbound links, you may want to review your linking practices unless you have compiled a comprehensive list of high quality and relevant resources for your visitors.

- Dynamically-generated content can create session IDs and URLs that contain a "?" character. Check your database administration settings to make sure that you aren't forcing search engine spiders to begin a new session each time they visit your site. Note: Preventing spiders from starting a session on your site may have negative effects if you use a third party for web site credit card processing. Always check with these services before making any changes of this nature.

- Web designers still utilize images as a way of displaying headings or other important areas of text instead of simple HTML simply because they think the Book Antiqua font with a drop shadow improves the aesthetics of the site. While branding and clarity are always paramount, keep in mind that multiple fonts used on the same page can have a negative impact on readability. And the more text written in HTML that can be read by search engine spiders, the better. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) also provide a way of attaining the look you want while keeping the code clean and in search engine-readable format.

- "Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate." Most webmasters assume that by using keywords in the page title that are relevant to the page's topic, that they are adhering to the