Every search engine has its own personality and they all can be very tempermental but here are some general things you shouldn't do or else the search engines will eat your website alive.

- Spam, don't do it! Your mom told you it and now I will, cheaters never prosper. So, don't make multiple webpages with the same content and then submit them all to the same search engines over and over again. This will most definitely get your site banned from the search engines. Also, don't over do it with your keywords. Don't be over zealous when trying to optimize your site for a certain keyword. Be modest about how many times you mention "fuzzy bunnies" in your website and image tags. Also, don't try to figure out how many variations of "fuzzy bunnies" there are in your meta tags (Fuzzy Bunnies, fuzzy bunnies, fUzzY BuNnies, etc.). Most search engines aren't case sensitive when it comes to meta tags so I would suggest just doing all your meta tags in lower case, plus most people search the net with lower case so it upper case spellings don't even really matter.

- Frames, search engines hate them. If your homepage is a frameset a bot doesn't have much stuff to crawl. So, if your site has to have frames I would suggest making your homepage a doorway page. A doorway page without frames that basically typically consists of a short description of the site, the site's logo, and an "Enter" link which will bring the user into the framed site. A doorway page doesn't give a bot much more to sink it's claws into than a frameset does but it does typically provide a little bit more information.

- Lacking Content, your website should have content. Not only will this make your visitor's trip to your webpage more worth while but it will make the search engine bots happy too. When I create an index page I like it to have at least 200 words of content written in it. This gives the bot an idea of what your webpage is about and will help your sites ranking in the search engines.