The biggest thing to remember is that CONTENT IS KING. While your customers will love the eye candy you put on your site, to the search engines (for the most part at present) pictures, video, audio, flash intro’s, etc… are meaningles to them. Actually it is generally understood that Flash Media, especially on the home page, while very attractive makes it next to impossible for the search engines spiders to get through it and properly index and rank your site.
In the words of my friend and mentor Jere’ CONTENT IS KING, the more words the better, at least 250 per page, search engines read text they can not see pictures no matter how nice they are. Now that being said, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jazz your site up with graphics and other things, but you have to do it so that the search engines recognize them as CONTENT elements to the page.
The better your content the more likely you are to be recognized as an important site. As amazing as it may seem, search engines are a sort of artificial intellegnce. They can read, they can tell when you repeat yourself, they can tell when your words make no sense, they can even spell. Case in point: Coffee-n-Caffeine, my coffee website. For a period of time I was curious why I was getting so many hits for the word Caffiene (a mispelling of Caffeine). Eventually I tracked it down in MSN’s search engine and an accidential misspelling I had made myself in the Home Page. A single misspelled word, put my site in the Number 1 Position on all the search engines when you searched with a misspelled Caffiene. Obviously many people misspell things, however now you notice that if you search and misspell a word the search engine offers you alternatives with the correct spelling. So it is not as successful a technique as it was before. However, if your site is selling something that people could misspell putting the common misspelling in your site could put you in a number 1 position that others missed.
Sparky