Web design factors into SEO?

People always ask me what the easiest route for their optimization process is. From site creation? Or from any point and time. Well web design and layout usually plays a big part in your optimization process and little things

• like position on the page of where the content is.
• Whether or not if your keywords are at the top of the content or at the bottom.
• If you have detailed headlines within your site's content letting search engine spiders know that this is important content.

Subtle things like this will help the spiders when they visit your site, not necessarily the bread and butter of the SEO but if you have your text content buried 5 clicks into your site from your home page, chances are that your home page is going to suffer on the search engine results page.

Make sure that any images, videos, blogs or any other information not in text form, has proper tags informing the spiders what the images are and what the videos are showing.
With a new site, this is the opportunity for you to take SEO slow and easy, monitoring the effects of all the SEO that you implement also giving the search engines a reason to come back to your site. Don't too much at once, you wont be able to tell what helped and what hurt your sites rankings. Navigation is a big part of new sites, mainly to allow search engines to find all the pages of your site getting all your pages indexed as soon as possible. Keyword research is a lot easier in this form of optimization, this way you can install the keywords on the site where they would be beneficial to be within the content of the site.

So when you design your site, (with Optimizing the site on the plate as well) make sure that you lay out the site so that its easy for both the searcher and the search engine, make subtle adjustments and not too much at one time, and watch your rankings grow. IF they fall between process's you know to revert back to what was keeping you ranked higher.
Rank Tracker is a perfect way to keep an eye on your keywords to see how you are doing in your quest for #1.