[shawnhenry]

a search-engine friendly web site is first and foremost user-friendly, designed and written for your human visitors first (primary audience). Then the site can be tweaked so that is can be easily indexed by the search engines (secondary audience). I believe that the phrase "search-engine friendly" means that the designer and copywriter are following the rules set forth by the search engines. Search engines do not want a bunch of pages created purely to rank. Pages created purely for ranking purposes are called doorway pages, which are often software generated and/or cloaked.
Search engines and directories (also called human-based search engines) want to deliver their users to the most relevant sites as quickly as possible. That is the value of a search engine -- delivering users to quality web sites with relevant information.
A search-engine friendly web site design satisfies multiple groups: end users, directory editors, and search engine spiders.