using php and search engines

noob, searching for a clue

[twocats]

Hey,
I have made a few posts tonight to a few different forums within this site. I'm trying to redo my site and add php/mysql to it. I have done a little php before, just not on my site yet. I have a basic page layout template that I will use to display my text files with. I' trying to figure out a good way to store the text content on my host, plus give search engine spiders the best place to crawl.
I was wondering what you thought of this idea. I could place my text content into basic, text only, html files and strip out the unwanted stuff by php as it is put into the template. This would allow me to put keywords (mostly) unique to each page and spiders could crawl clean html. Does this sound like a good idea?
Thanks

[Nick_W]

I'd recommend a good PHP Template Engine [smarty.php.net]

Nick

[mcdave]

I'm not clear what you're saying.
Do you mean that the content on each page is a plain text file, and the php parses it by turning line breaks into p tags and wrapping the whole thing in a template?
Are you talking about serving different pages to search engines so that pages with lots of navigation and images go to real users and plain text goes to search engines? I'm not sure what you mean by the unwanted stuff. Nor do I understand text only html files. Do you mean without tags? Why would you do that? Google for instance is affected by heading tags.
IMO, all the pages should be clean (X)HTML.
It sounds like a good idea to me, but search engines need navigation. How else will they find your other pages? Google also caches pages, and users have the choice of viewing the cached page. This is a good reason for serving the same pages to search engines.