1. Do limit Flash, and anything else that will make your initial page load slow. 50% of internet uses still have slow connections, and a lot of people with high speed connection lose interest in a new website if they don’t have immediate gratification. Leave the Flash for subpages in your website, allowing the visitor to choose to look at it or not.

2. Do have tons of related content. Content is King. And Queen, Princess, Prince, the whole dang court. Other SEO methods (meta tags, etc) are the peasants, still needed to run a kingdom but search engines don’t notice them as much. If you do a search for nearly anything on Google, you’ll notice one thing in common with all the top sites: lots and lots of relevant text.

3. Don’t do flashing, scrolling, required downloads, pop ups – anything that can be construed as annoying, or worse, not work on the visitor’s browser.

4. Don’t use music, or have it off to allow the visitor to play it. You don’t want a potential client to get fired when your website’s music comes blasting out of work speakers they didn’t know were on, nor would you want it waking up a baby. Music is very similar to Flash…use it wisely or not at all.

5. Do have quality design and coding – I can’t stress enough the effect of good design and coding to a business. Your visitors are more likely to come and stay if your site looks good (holds visual appeal) and has easy to find content. The back end coding (html, css, etc) is equally important – websites that use current standards are more favorably looked upon by search engines.

6. Do blog – and blog regularly. I highly recommend a self hosted WordPress Blog (like I’m using right now!) that can be customized to match your site, or BE your site. Google loves blog posts. Your site visits will improve dramatically if you post regularly and give readers and the search engines something to keep coming back to.