What every Webmaster should know and what you (with a business and website) should make sure your webmaster knows.  If not, then you need to think about changing webmasters.

It is most important YOU own your website and not your Webmaster, when you choose a domain name, YOU must be the person buying it. If your Webmaster says they can do it for you to save you time, then you will NOT be the owner.

Navigation is extremely important: If your poentenial customer visits your site and gets lost because there is no navigation, they probably will go away and not come back. People want to know where they are and how to get back to home or some other page.

Making sure your website is enhanced for Search Engines

• Google - “Sites' positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results”.
• PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value
• How many hits, links and pages (best if have at least 5 pages)
• Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.
• Frames are not good for the search engines, it is difficult for them to find information to pass in a search.
• Meta Tags – description and keywords
• Should be different on each page of your website
• Title Tag – different for each page of your website
• Flash – search engines skip over flash movies, try to keep small flash programs that don’t take up the entire page and do not use a flash intro.
• Words, words and more words – Search Engines go to the largest and boldest words first.
• Images can be picked up if they have an alt tag.  This is the description you see when you hold your mouse over it. 
• Best if your site is in XHTML and using CSS and conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium Standards (www.w3.org).
• Content developers should make content understandable and navigable. This includes not only making the language clear and simple, but also providing understandable mechanisms for navigating within and between pages.
• Quality Guidelines (described in Google) can help your site not to be penalized and not show up at all.  Your webmaster should know these.