You can have a good, informative, clear and beautiful website, but if the search engines cannot find you, your customers can't either. Therefore it is vital that everything is done to improve ranking in the search engines and thus for improving the amount of visitors (potential customers) to your websites.
The three major search engines are: Google, MSN (Windows Live) and Yahoo.

NOTE: in can take up to several weeks for a search engine to index and submit your website.

General
Search engines like to spider and rank sites that appeal to users. This means that the main rule of search engine friendly design is the same as the rule for web design in general: Make it user-friendly.
But before search-spiders can find your website, and to improve your ranking, there are many things that can be done. Here a list of tips:

What GraFreckle Webdesign does
1 - We enter <META> tags in the source of the website containing important keywords, description of the website and instructions for the search engine spider.
2 - We give the internet pages and images the keywords that are in the <META> tags.
3 - Google will not add a web page to its index unless there is at least one other web page in its index that links to one of your web pages. GraFreckle adds that first link to your new website on her own (portfolio page), which stays there for at least a couple of months.
4 - We give you advice on how to improve the ranking in i.e. Google.

What you can do yourself as owner of the website
1 - Make sure you provide GraFreckle with the most important keywords before the designing and building of your website begins. These keywords are words that people might type in a search engine looking for your website.
2 - Make sure these keywords are included in your text all over the website, but mainly on the first page in the first paragraph. Therefore it is important to start the text on the welcome page with an overall summery of what your business is all about, this way most keywords will be included.
3 - Search engines prefer not to have large amount of text on a website (and so do visitors). If you do want a lot of information (text) on your website, we advise that you split it up into different pages when arranging your contents before GraFreckle can start designing and building your website.
4 - Once your website is up and running, try to get other websites on the internet to make a link to your website. The more your website is linked on the internet, the higher your ranking. Email the owners or webmasters of the internet websites that you think might include a link to yours and request that your website will be linked on theirs. Often they will ask you to return the favour, in most cases that would mean that you will need a "links"-page in your own website to do so.
5 - Keep your website up-to-date. Not only will visitors be impressed, but Google will improve your ranking if you maintain your website frequently.
6 - Finally, it might help to manually add your website to some search engines (although most will automatically find your website without this manual submission):
     · Google
     · MSN (Windows Live)
     · Yahoo
     · AltaVista