There are much more important things to concentrate on. I would just concentrate on making the best site you can possibly make and forget about that.

When you want to get traffic to your site. Your link building strategy will be the most important thing that will determine your long term success.

Do some basic on-page seo. Dont over optimize. Figure out backlinking. Create an awesome website with lots of good content.

That's the important stuff. Everything else should sort it out if you do these things correctly. Dont sweat the little things. Get the important things right.

Actual design and layout? No

The site isn't very focused.

You need to work on basic things like your title tags and meta descriptions.

Even if you got high in the results (not exactly likely for anything competitive as the site stands at the moment) you need to encourage real humans to click and visit.

Which, with the best will in the world, they're not likely to do at the moment. But then the site does look MFA to me.

Theme plays very important role in SEO, first thing you have to understand that your site should load faster, if it is not loading faster then you should check the problem..... it may be due to theme.

Try using SEO friendly theme, if you are using Wordpress then you can find many SEO friendly themes.

I too agree with Mike and Matthew. Not saying I knew it, in fact I actually learnt a valuable tip so thanks guys

Not just the theme, but navigation and innerlinking in particular. When people say 'theme' they don't just mean the looks of theme (although that can effect bounce rate and other SEO factors), but actual on-page aspects of the theme.

Use a good on page scanner (I use Woorank) and see where your combination of theme and plugins are lacking on page. Stick to themes that have validated code.

Here are six ways that your design and/or your theme will affect SEO, just off the top of my head:

1. The speed that a given page loads
2. The order in which a spider crawls links and content
3. The efficiency/accessibility with which a spider crawls links and content
4. The time a visitor stays on a page before returning to search results
5. The redundancy of on-page elements, e.g. many free themes misuse H1 tags
6. The likelihood of a visitor sharing or linking your website

You want to find a theme that is clean and efficient in both form and function, and you probably want to use plugins to make sure that your basic on-page SEO is spot on. Then, you want to make sure that you structure your website in such a way that it is easy to navigate for both search engine spiders and visitors alike.

Look up SEO silo - it is a somewhat dated, but still relevant concept that you would do well to learn about.

I recommend either Thesis (if you don't mind learning about hooks) or Genesis.

After researching a lot on Warrior Forum, I have concluded two things:

1. Site structure and design is important. It's like a virtual mart whose interior decor will make or mar your mood. Too much clutter or too little substance will ward away your visitors.
2. Content should be interesting and engaging.

And both the site design and the content are important ingredients of SEO.