What exactly search engines look for in a website to be indexed? What exactly viewers look for when they want to make use of the search engines to get their information? Those are the two big questions.

On the one hand, search engines cannot index videos, flash, frames and Java Scripts and therefore cannot be read by search engines. Their bots and crawlers look for simple contents with keywords and phrases describing the business. A website design generally based on content and html navigation can be easily indexed by search engines robots.

On the other hand, visitors are humans and can read everything that can be seen on a website. And at times, humans look for something like videos, images and flash animations that the bots and crawlers avoid.

That means trade off between the two. Have enough content with keywords and phrases about the business that makes it easier for the search engines to index but along with that what humans need and want from websites.

Search engines are the best way to get online leads. Check out guidelines for individual search engines so your website can be easily indexed by major SEs like Yahoo, Google and Windows Live Search etc. Search engines don't like cloaking or backdoor pages created purely for ranking purposes. Therefore, try to avoid such techniques.

Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your website without using long, complicated scripts.

Avoid presenting important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Then again, it all depends on the individual business. If, let's say, it's about music or travel and such, you have to have images, flashes and videos. Along with these, like I stated before, have quality content with enough keywords and phrases for bots that search engines send to index your website.

By adding relevant keywords in the content and keywords as links in the web pages, you can give the best SEO way to website for high rankings in search engines with the targeted keywords. Search engine friendly website design means html site navigation, use of header tags (H1, H2...), better placement of images with alt tags and relevant content placement and coding.

So, don't worry about including videos and images. You can be found with Video Search and Image search but yes, frames and flash files can't help you in search engine rankings. Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don't correspond to the conceptual model of the web. And try to use Flash only where it is needed.

When you use a wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor, try not using HTML tags like to style your page. Instead, use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

But most of all, give your visitors the information that they're looking for.