So what do you mean by search engine friendly sites? Online businesses are defined by how a Search Engine robot renders them to be important from an end user point of view. Robots or bots as they are often called are simple programs that try and digest the content provided on your website. Even though bots are getting sophisticated these days, the main criteria to be fulfilled by a site are relevant content that will keep users interested. A clean design usually makes it easier for the bot to navigate and digest this information, minimal use of tags, scripts, blank filler images, flash based content, complicated scripts, appropriate use of meta tags, titles, heading tags will ensure that the search engine robot will digest all the information provided on the site. If you are careful from the very beginning, you can cut down a lot of your expenditure on search engine optimisation (SEO). One of the main aims of SEO is to help ?clean up? a site. In other words bring it up to speed conforming to the latest web standards.

Here are few things you should bare in mind whilst getting your site designed:

• Use light weight XHTML/CSS based design with minimal use of tags. Make sure the site validates both these standards
• Use colours wisely and font size should be fairly visible
• Make sure images have alt and title tags
• Be sure that the page is named properly, you do not want people to be seeing Untitled page. Choose a short description that truly describes your website. Search engines might not be fooled by spamming this nowadays but at the same time it is important that people get the right idea about what your website is
• Choose keywords carefully, do not make up random keywords or over stuff keywords in the meta tag. You are trying to help the search engine bot, not confuse it
• Make sure you have a robots.txt page at the document root. Even if it is blank, most search engine bots will look for this file
• Use the h1 tag at least once and the h2 tags wherever necessary
• Write original content.
• Make sure you do not have any spelling mistakes; proof read your content before publishing it. Probably ask a few people to go through it
• Remove all Java Script, Styles from the HTML page and store them separately on an appropriate .js or .css file

These are just a few points that will help you build a successful website. Of course the world of SEO is not limited to these as it involves a lot more.

For further reading:
Search Engine Optimisation on Wikipedia
Google Page Rank