Building your pages in such a way as to fit the preferences of the search engine providers can give you a big boost in your ranking and in page results. There are a few tactics that will make this possible.
First off, you should read and study the guidelines published by the major search engines. Google takes credit for being the first of the major search engines to list how to optimize your page for their perusal. The "Webmaster Guidelines" details the most common types of optimization that they consider deceptive or manipulative of the search engine algorithms. "SEO Guidelines" is their online advice and instructions on what they feel are the correct applications to take to make your website pages easier to index with their search engine.
Since this open policy was made clear by Google, the other major search engine companies have also followed this trend towards teaching compliance and now you may compare their instructions to the guidelines published by MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista and Ask; formerly Ask Jeeves. They have available their "Terms of Service", a guideline of search engine spam and definitions of what they consider inappropriate actions.
It is possible that a design feature of your site could get you penalized without you having intentionally seeking to deceive the search engines. It is a very good idea to compare the different guidelines and keep up with any updates or new policies they come out with. Research is a key to any good business and researching the needs and desires of the search engines will help you lead the pack as it were with your competitors.
Other good places to check are the webmaster forums. From these you can usually pick up tips on better optimization techniques or the latest method that has been banned by the search engines. One should always be on the lookout for ways to tweak their pages for better performance.
The search engine companies themselves encourage you to report suspicious SEO tactics to them. If you encounter a website that is blatantly set up to spam the search engines Google wants to know about it at search-quality@google.com and you can also report to information@ask.com about sites in their results pages. Yahoo has a specific area on their website where you can report search engine abuses. This policing action is designed to make the entire process of ranking quality sites over deceivers an ongoing process of giving the end user the best results possible to their information search.
Despite the admonitions of some SEO experts, the search engines do prefer you create your site with the human user in mind and make sure the content of your pages is relevant and understandable. Make your site user friendly and easy to navigate and they will take this into consideration when ranking your site in their result pages. After all, the purpose of their efforts is to make the world wide web a more helpful place for humans.
The thing to do is at the very least to include good text based content and simple descriptive navigation menus. Include good keyword phrases that are most likely to be used by real humans in a search. Link to properly relevant sites outside your own and make sure all the links, shopping carts or other features on your site work properly.
