SEO is really more of an art than a science.  There are several companies out there who claim to get you on the first page of the search engines.  What these companies won't tell you is that they will only get your site into the top page for 3 key terms.  Now if your trying to run a site who's key term is Take That or Manchester united, and a company claims to be able to get you there, good luck and I'll personally take my hat of to them if they succeed! However if you're like the rest of the businesses out there that want people to find you for a variety of reasons, there is no substitute for good content - as 'content is king'... really.

There are definitly things to be aware of when trying to create a SEO friendly website:

• For one, your website should be XHTML compliant - which should make sure your web content is easy to index.
• Webites should be updated often - Search engines just love to index new pages, pages with new or useful content.
• Make sure you have a site map - Making sure that the search engine spiders can find all of your pages.
• Make sure your link text is descriptive - Link text should describe where the link takes you rather than "Click Here".  For instance, "View our CMS solutions" is better than "Click Here".

One of the interesting things about search engines is that you cannot force them to visit your site and if they don't visit your website who on earth is going to know you are there. Just submitting your link to the search engines is no way to get your site crawled.  Instead, you have to coax the search engines to crawl your site by adding links to your site on other sites already indexed by the search engines. 

All Fastnet CMS driven client websites take about 1 day to initially get crawled by MSN and Yahoo!, and just 3 days for Google to do a deep crawl of the website pages.