Like I was saying, just desiging your website is just about nothing. You need to get it optimized to make sure that the search engines rank them well.
One good way to get your site ranked well is to get as many sites as possible to be linking to you. That can be done by giving your site some good content. How do people find that your site has good contents? You need to use appropriate keywords, that really match searches of people, and those that are relevant to the actual content that you have placed on your site.
Let us assume that you have a trading site, where you sell apple macbooks. How do you get people getting the laptops from your site? One way is to advertise your site thru PPC, and end up spending lots of money on it and get no page ranking at all, another is to list them on forums with no follow links, and when the posts where you have entered your domain are archived, you endup with nothing. The best way to get your sites linked properly is by taking good tips from an web design and SEO related blog that would give extensive tips to get your site reach top ranking on the search engines.
Get your domain names nice. Domain names are most important to get your sites on the top.
Host your sites on good IPs. Get hosting from datacentres like theplanet, softlayer etc, and not from the 3rd rate cheap datacentres who would possess IPs that might be blacklisted.
Use google apps for mailing, and stop using mails on your own server. Let your IP be only for the hosting of your site.
Avoid hosting your site on a shared IP. Dedicated Ips dont cost much.
Get link backs from top ranked blogs.
Follow all of these, and more, and you will find your site on the top in no time at all.
