When considering a new web design it is quite common to focus on how to impress the sites prospective visitors with a whole lot of razamatazz, otherwise known as flash. While it is important to make an impression with your sites design it will all be for nothing if no one actually visits it. By observing a number of simple rules it is possible to give your site a head start.

Search engines loves content, they lap it up. If your site has a lot of textual content this will improve your ranking chances. A common seo mantra, to the point of derision is "content is king". The right content matters however. I mentioned Flash, it's a great tool for creating animated graphics and embedding video but unfortunately search engines can't read flash files. To them flash is a ghost mixed up with all that living content. By all means include flash but don't rely on an all flash site to catch Googles eye. To Google it will appear as an empty url. Including text in your site is a given but make sure your text contains the keywords that you want to rank for. Don't just throw your keywords onto the page however. Weave them into your paragraphs so that they read naturally.

When designing the navigation it comes natural to designers to want to create something with the wow factor. As this is the interface between the user and the website it needs to be intuitive, clear and also emphasize the sites design. Here's the problem though, search engines likes to put emphasis on links coming in and out of sites and while they can read alt tags on images they find it much easier to just read text. So while attempting to create a navigation menu that will impress try to use textual links and css and avoid the old javascript image swap.

One more thing. If you conform to the w3c standards when writing your xhtml and css you will make it that much easier for search engine crawlers to understand your code when they're scrolling through it. You also get the added bonus of offering a user friendly site.