Irrespective of the choice of your automation tools like SilkTest, QTP, Selenium or any other test tool you can follow the following rules
Web UI testing :
* Have a unique name for every web page.
* Follow uniform naming scheme for similar objects.
* No two objects should have the same name.
* Every image should have an ALT attribute set.
* Dynamic content must have a proper name, ID or XPath.
* Data tables should have specific names.
* Cross-browser stability.
Web service layer (Rest/Soap) testing :
* API Request/Response verification.
* API error code testing.
* Web service XSD validation.
* Cross-server validation.
