Search Engines look at web pages in a similar way a person would look at pages. Well, at least they try to mimick this process. Keep in mind that writing naturally for your audience will provide the best content. After figuring out the site structure and what you want to say to your audience you are ready to begin designing.

Web Design

Begin with meta tags. Choose 10-15 keyword phrases that describe how you want people to find you. Meta descriptions for each page should be different. Keep these 20-40 words in length and describe the content of that particular page.

Title tags are also an important part of the search engine algorithm. Titles for each page should reflect the page content.

Use Header tags for main ideas. Follow up these headers with descriptions of services and/or products. The use of internal links to other main topics could be benificial for the text within the anchor tag.

Images should always have an alt tag that describes the picture. Do not use image1.jpg etc…

Create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to Google webmaster tools. Verify the site map. The interface also provides nice reports of how Googlebot views your site!

Create robots.txt file to restrict pages not relevant that you wish search engine bots to avoid.

The use of flash media is okay. Thanks to recent technological improvements, search engine bots are able to extract information from the .swf file. I would avoid using too large of elements that will slow loading times which are still weighed in the search engine algorithm.

After Design

Naturally promote your business online. The search engine optimization process is neverending! Placing banner ads on free listing sites with keywords is a great way to get new business, traffic, and search engine results. Placing listings in directories and signing up for social networking also helps bring attention to your site. Spamming your link could have extremely negative results, so I recommend taking your time. After all, who has the time for all this?