The following code snippet shows how I use rsync to updated the Metawrite Help Web site. It excludes subversion directories, and files in the "versions" folder (in earlier versions of Metawrite, a large number of versions of each document were stored here, so it didn't make sense to transfer all of them):

rsync -rv -e "ssh" --exclude '*/_resources/versions/' --exclude '.svn' 
   --copy-unsafe-links  ~/Documents/Writing/MetawriteHelp/ 
    username@metawrite.net:/home/username/webapps/public/