When it comes to planning your new web site, keep this in mind -- Size Matters. The more pages of keyword-rich content that your site has, the more important the search engines will believe your site to be. Just follow these simple rules:

• Content must be relevant to your site's topic
• Add new content on a regular basis
• Keyword density is important -- short pages of text with lots of keywords
• When possible, use your keywords in the page file names

Keep your content on-target. That means that if you are selling auto parts, and you add some Paris Hilton content for the purpose of siphoning off some popular search engine traffic, you might get banned as a spammer (it has happened, believe it or not).

Users are drawn to fresh content, and the search engines are very focused on returning relevant results to the users. So, if you have fresh content on a regular basis, then you are viewed as being more important than you competitor, who set up his web site three years ago and has yet to change anything. The more frequently you can add content, the better; I frequently recommend to clients that they consider adding a blog to their business site (I'll have a lot more to say about business blogging in future posts). If you can write to it at least twice a week (one or two paragraph entries), that will vault you way ahead of the competitors' websites that are simply gathering dust.

If writing a blog is not your thing, look for other types of content you can add. For example, in the area where I live, there is a financial services website that is number one on Google. He only has 5 pages about his business. However, hanging off of one of those five pages, he has 50 MORE pages of legislation (literally copied and pasted from Lexis/Nexis) regarding division of assets in divorce; one page for each state. Boom, he lands on the top spot on Google for having a large, keyword-rich site.

The point is -- plan your site to be growing and dynamic, not static and stale, and the Google gods will reward you for it.