How should you lay out your site?

If you are at the planning stage then you have the ideal opportunity to create a site that will be easy to optimize and that will rank as well as it can.

Of course if you are working with an existing site then you will be somewhat stuck with the design that you have. As long as the index page of the site isn't just a pretty flash entry page you will have something to work with.

However if you have a blank page but want some interaction on your site how can you lay it out so that you will still rank well?

Firstly you want to have either an image or logo in the top left corner. This is the first thing that the SE's spider will look at and although it can't see the image or logo it can read the alt text that you can put behind it.