Keeping SEO in mind when you design your site can make it much easier for you to get a good page rank and more traffic from day one.
Link Farms:
Some search engines use a recommendation system as part of how they rank your web site. So webmasters will often trade links with other webmasters. The different search engines see a link from web site A to web site B as a recommendation from web site A. a link farm is when a web master will have many different websites and will just fill them with links to all the pages of his other sites no matter how unrelated the items on the different sites may be.
Spam:
Many people think that spam is just those annoying emails that offer to increase your size or guarantee weight loss, one of my favorites are the stock tips that come in from nowhere because I may actually buy stocks because someone I don’t know got my email address as well as a few thousand others and told me to buy some stock, or the annoying pop ups that appear when you are trying to read a web site. These are common forms of spam but they are not the only kind. There are also spam websites. This is when there is no content on the site of actual use and the sites content is only to try to bring in people in the hopes that you will click a link to a site that pays the first site for traffic. Some websites will pay $0.25 for every person you bring to their site. These sites are also considered spam.
Content:
The content of your site is very important. You need to make sure that not only is it relevant to the topic of your site, but that it is interesting or informative to your readers/customers. If you do not change the content on your site and add items regularly you will find that people will stop visiting your site. Lets say you have a travel website and you do not update it often you may still be advertising summer vacations in the winter and will not be making as many winter vacations sales as you should be.
Algorithms:
An algorithm is basically a mathematical equation. The search engines check over website on the internet every few weeks. It then tallies up how relevant your content keywords are compared to your Meta keywords, the basic design of the site and it counts all the links to your site. It then takes all this information and does what it does and then it comes out with your page rank. Then in another few weeks when it runs it again it will recalculate and re rank the site.
User Interface:
One of the things a search engine will look for is how simple your site will be for the end user. The site needs to be easy to get around and it should not be too difficult to find information listed on an inner page. If I am looking for something and I can not find it on your site in a few seconds I will just click on another site. So make sure to keep that in mind.
Factoring in the above information when building your website or taking it into account and redesigning you site will help you bring in more traffic.