A description of what I have come across so far in my efforts in web authoring. All my efforts are simply for friends or for my own interest - and are unpaid. As such, the methods I have used are free services.
Web hosting
We chose lunar pages (note: affiliated link) and have been very happy with them. All service requests have been responded to within 12 hours, their interface is easy to use, and the price/quantity ratio was one of the best around. They also have an affiliation scheme - which is well worth signing up for if you are doing multiple sites. Set up your first, and then refer yourself on for each additional site.
For choosing the web host, the most useful site I found was WebhostingReviews.com.
The first choice would have been infinology, (the promised storage and bandwidth is pretty amazing) except that they did not respond to enquiries ever - plus the phrase "Infinology is a clean web hosting service with good morals and values" gave a negative vibe about that particular company.
The site for James Snidle uses Omnis (he already had an incomplete webpage). They seem reliable enough - they are a fraction cheaper ($1 less per month), for about 20% of what is offered a lunar pages. However, their control panel is not so flexible, or easy to follow or read (black on dark gray?). It was a challenge to determine how publish from front page (there is two conflicting descriptions, neither of which worked), and I never received a response from their support when asking about that. Some of my reaction is probably due to the extra familiarity with lunar pages, and I am certainly not experiencing actual difficulties with them.
Search engine submissions and info
Courtesy of some research at shambles, I have been using submit express, which has lead to some very decent rankings at exactseek, aol, msn and yahoo. The single biggest lead was having my friend Taylor list me on his website Captain Cursor Creations, a page with a high Google page rank, which had me indexed on Google within two days! I am now visited by the "64" bots daily.
I was having some difficulty submitting dmoz - in that there would be now "response to submission" page. Courtesy of a very rapid response on cre8asite forums, I discovered that this was only due to heavy traffic, and that repeat submissions simply over-rode the previous submission and did not raise any "spam" flags. I had also noticed that the "Scooter" web crawler from altavista had been visiting my sites almost daily, but there was still no index for them on that search engine. According to cre8asite forums, this turns out to be normal, and that it can take months to finally appear on altavista. Additional note: resource zone has proved very useful in the dmoz listing process - it may be slow, but rewarding :) My thread is Site Submission Status.
A site I do not recommend is MagicYellow.com. We have received close to 7 or 8 calls trying to convince us to register with them, to the point of the sales person becoming almost abusive to Guy and myself.
Tips and Tricks
Every page includes its own title, and a set of keywords that appear on that page.
Site-map or text-only versions of the site are accessible from the front page.
Frames are used only for decorative purposes, so that each individual "page" can be linked to properly. The contents of each frame are completely reproduced in the alternate text for the frame. Links to the frame from the page, and to the page from the frame every time, so that any link directly to a frame, can easily reach the real site.
All images have all relevant information in their alternative text, including who took the photograph, where it is, what it is of, etc....
On the whole, this accentuates the presence of keywords by the repetition of what appears in the alternative text for frames, and what appears in the page appearing in the frame.
Though I have yet to really work on James' site, and this site is still in development, both Sam's and Guy's sites are faring very well, in particular Guy's site turns up the first 3 to 5 responses on searches for "art restoration san francisco" or "art restoration california" on google, yahoo and some others. Not msn or altavista :(
Also, regarding the problem of un-welcome web-crawlers, check out perfect ban, a discussion from Webmaster World.
Update Oct 25
Well, I have certainly grown to rely on the forums - in particular cre8asite forums and the site of its owner Web Marketing and Site Promotion. Here Ammon Johns outlines many design things to watch out for, with a particularly interesting approach to frames (How to optimize for Frames), where a frame is redirected to its host page if it detects it is running "with frames" and is the "top" frame. As yet, I haven't experimented with this redirection approach, but may do. - though I already had the alternative text, and navigable page part accomodated.
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