PHP, forms and search engine optimization

OK. Here’s my setup. I want to see what changes I need to make in order to help with search engine optimization. First of all, my first main page that does anything is index.php. Now, I know by default, pages get directed to index.html, right? So, to get it to index.php, I’m assuming that I have to do something similar to this in order to bypass user interaction:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;URL=http://www.blahblah.com/index.php“>

Then even this page does a redirect. It checks to see if the EULA cookie has been set. If so, then it sends the user to the main page. If it hasn’t been set, then it sends them to the disclaimer page.

So, my first question is how does this affect search engines? Because index.html is technically the first page, but it doesn’t have anything in it that search engines look for other than maybe an appropriate TITLE and a META description tag, right?

Then my second question is regarding the index.php page. On this page, we have a simple form verifying whether or not the user has read our EULA. How does having this simple form affect spiders crawling my site? Will they be able to read through it and then crawl the rest of my site? Thanks in advance!

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