Front Page and SEO basics

I was helping a friend (we'll call him Mike) figure out why his site was not showing up in search engines - specifically Google. It didn't take long to figure out what was happening or not happening. He had good titles, and meta tags on his pages, but there were two issues that leaped out at me. One obvious and the other not so much.

Obvious issue: The headlines were built using paragraph
and font tags not with H1 or H2 tags. This was easily corrected.

Not so obvious issue: When Mike built his web site, Frontpage placed the HTML for his "Main content" near the bottom of the code. His footer code, and other miscellaneous code was above his content. Therefore when Google spidered his site it thought the footer info was more important that all his content.

Fixing this problem was harder to accomplish. We wound up rebuilding the pages. Mike and I also needed to look at the "code view" in Frontpage to make sure his content remained near the top of the pages HTML.
Lessons Learned:
While there are many tools and programs available to help anyone build web sites. You should have a basic understanding of HTML and SEO, or have a friend who can help you out.