It is well known that the best way to search engine optimize a website in terms of its design is to keep it as free as of many bells and whistles as possible (including images, banners and graphics.) However once you have some excellent copy to put on the front pages of your site your job does not stop there. You should make sure your web design is going to nicely support that text as well.
First of all make sure that there is no Flash, image map bytes, java script or any other kind of multimedia on that page. The search engine spiders will read that as blank space. Second of all make sure that you include text for your image ALT tags as well as for all of your anchor tags.
Thirdly, you need to consider how your HTML code will be prioritized and arranged on the page. It is also absolutely essential that your HTML code is clean as well. It does not matter if the web page looks right. It is what is beneath it that matters most to the search engine spiders (the sloppy HTML scraps and ends of mistakes that you dont see.) If this is sloppy enough your website could end up being ignored or repressed for a long time before it actually becomes part of any page...