Remember that search engines index text, text, text! When you have flash buttons, graphic navigation and other non-text elements on your website, search engines spiders find it difficult if not impossible to index.
There are many small things you can do when you design or re-design a website to make it more search engine friendly. Each thing you do may seem small but every little bit helps.
There are several things you can do when programming to make the code and thus, the page search engine friendly.
Make sure you are including your "tags" between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags on the web page. These tags include:
Having these tags in place in the head of each page helps the search engine spiders identify the content of the page.
You should put key words in <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and even <h4> tags. The search engines see your headings and index them. If you don't like the look that the heading <h> tag creates, use CSS to change the appearance.
Pages should have at least 250 words in them, with keyword phrases occurring plenty of times. Take care, however to not overload your content with the keyword phrases. Remember your site needs to be readable by humans too. Search engines only read about the first 80 - 100 lines of coding in any page. You want your content near the top. I've seen pages written with 400+ lines of code, using Javascript within the page for navigation and the first "search engine readable" lines don't start until around line 250 of the coding. By then, the search engine spider has become bored with your page and moved on!
Whenever you have a picture or other item embedded on a page, make sure to list keywords in the Alt tag for that item. These tags are indexed by search engines!
When you put a link on your page, try to use keywords in the link.
Example: <a href="index.html" title="Media Net Impressions Search Engine Optimized Web Design in Belize">Media Net Impressions Web Design</a>
Titles for links get indexed by search engines.
Make sure that your tags are all closed and that your programming is done appropriately to HTML or XHTML standards. You can click on the link below to go to the validation website. Broken code can stop the search engine spiders from properly indexing your site!
See my links page for links to more interesting material about proper search engine friendly website development.
You can also read more on this site about Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.
Visit my page on Link Strategy and Link Building to read more about how to design a great links program for your website.