The purpose of building a website is to drive traffic to it. If there are no visitors, the purpose stands defeated. Practically all the traffic directed to a site is attributable to major search engines like AltaVista, Yahoo, Google, MSN, and many others. It is therefore of paramount importance to design your site in a way that takes into account search engine optimization. By designing a web site that is search engine friendly you can be sure of ranking high in search engines and will host to a much greater number of visitors as would otherwise have reached your site. The way this happens is based on the way search engines operate.

All leading search engines have programs known as crawlers or robots that are responsible for indexing the sites to be displayed in their search results. These crawlers are little programs that travel through the Internet looking at websites and reading information coded into a web page. Crawlers follow page links and after reading the contents make a record of the page in their database and retrieve such listing in response to a web search conducted by netizens.

Therefore to ensure easy indexing for your site you must make sure to avoid everything that may confuse search engines. For example, do not use frames on your site as these can only lead to confusing search engine robots which may even skip your site altogether because of the frames. More over frames are a pain to users who have to resort to long and complicated scripts if they want to bookmark a particular page on your website. Similar crawler problems arise when you use Flash intros or images on your site. As the robots can read only text present in your source code, they find reading difficult if you embed important words in images and animations, instead of a being presented in a text format. This will vastly affect your site's ranking with search engines. Crawlers are also unable to read JavaScript. This is also something that you need to avoid in the interest of better SEO compatibility.

You must also ensure the use of meta tags on all the pages of your web site to enable search engines immediately grasp page context and decide on indexing it or not. When you use Meta tags, the work of the search engine robot becomes easy allowing more frequent crawling and indexing of your site.

Everything said, the bottom line is that content is the key to designing a site favoring search engine optimization. All your visitors are in search of content that is available on your site. You must make sure to have informative keyword rich content on your site aimed at fulfilling a visitor's need, whether the need is for pure information, some product or service your content should be able to communicate very clearly. This will rank you high with search engines. You must also make sure to present the optimum amount of content on a page. As a thumb rule anywhere from 200 to 250 words is the most suitable. More content will require your visitor to scroll down for reading which most are reluctant to do.