Search Engine Optimization, or SEO , involves much more than submitting your website to search engines. In order for your website to be successful, you need to adopt several different SEO techniques. And, one of the most important SEO techniques you need to consider is your website design.

You may think that the actual look of your site has nothing to do with how well it ranks in the search engines--think again. There are some aspects of site design that can definitely affect your search engine rankings in significant ways. And, some of these aspects can also affect your readership. There are actually quite a lot of things about website design that you need to contemplate before publishing your website or submitting it to search engines.

First of all, you need to know how search engines crawl websites. Search engines are not able to crawl through frames and flashing graphics. Search engines only see text; therefore, if your main website page is composed mainly of photos, with very little text, the search engine spiders may rank the website very low.

So, it is essential to make sure that every page of your website contains text that is pertinent to the website. It is generally a good idea to aim for at least 300 words of text related to the topic of the website per page. Of course, you can have more than 300 words of text on any given page. And, this text can be broken up into smaller chunks of text, including lists, photo captions, and headlines. But, make sure the appropriate content is present, or the search engine spiders will possibly rank your site poorly.

Now, back to those aforementioned flashing graphics. Those can cause a problem in another way, besides affecting the search engine spiders. Some site visitors may have slow modems; in fact, some may even have 56K modems that load pages extremely slowly. If your website has a great deal of large graphics or ones that flash, this will cause your pages to load even more slowly. Visitors with slower modems will likely click on their 'back' button before your website finishes loading. While this doesn't mean that you cannot include any graphics, it does mean that you need to be careful with your choices and not add too many to any one page.

Color choices are also quite important. Poor color choices can drive readers away from your website. Choosing colors that are too bright or too dark can make it difficult for a person to read the text--and, no one is going to exert himself to read text on a visually-unpleasant website when he can click on his 'back' button and go to the next website listed in the search engine.

The same goes for font styles. While you may prefer to select a unique or different font style for your website, think carefully about your choice. Some font styles can be difficult to read in blocks of text and are best used only as headlines or signatures. Also, it is important to remember that some browsers (such as Opera or Safari, perhaps) may not be able to show all font styles. So, if you choose some obscure type of font style, you may end up driving readers away because the text is difficult to read--or because the text simply doesn't show up at all.

When planning site design, it is always best to ask for other opinions. Style the website how you like it, then ask other unbiased people for honest opinions before making your website go live. This is the best way to catch design problems ahead of time.