Your floors are a major investment; getting new ones put in will be very expensive. Eventually all flooring material will wear out and need to be replaced. However there are things that you can do to delay this so that you won't have to replace your floors as often as you otherwise would. Proper floor care is the key.
The most important thing when it comes to caring for your floors is to keep them clean. Most of the wear and tear that will damage your floors is the result of dirt. The dirt on a solid surface floor can cause scratches and dirt on a carpet floor can cause the fibers to be damaged. In either case it is going to make your floor look old and worn a lot faster than it would if you were to keep it clean. The best thing that you can do to keep your floors clean is to sweep, mop or vacuum as appropriate on a regular basis.
A big help in keeping your floors clean so that they look their best is to keep them from getting dirty in the first place. The best way to do this is to place mats at the entry ways so that people can wipe their feet before they enter. It is really quite remarkable how much dirt can be caught by these mats so they are well worth using. Keeping the dirt from getting in will also make it a lot easier to clean the floor when the time for that comes.
When you are going to clean your floors you need to make sure that you are using the right product. This is one of the biggest mistakes that people make and it causes all kinds of damage to their floors. The manufacturer should recommend a cleaning product for your floors and it is best to use that product. However if you don't know what the manufacturer recommended or even who the manufacturer was you will need to find out what your floors are made of and use the right product for taking care of them. This will prevent you from using a product on your floor that can damage it.
In general the less stuff you can put on your floor the better since almost anything that sits in one spot is going to do some damage. Potted plants are a particular problem since they tend to cause condensation on the floor which will damage it. The other thing that you need to be careful about is when you are moving furniture, you obviously want to lift it rather than drag it. One other thing to be aware of is that the casters on the bottom of a lot of furniture can do damage to solid surface floors. It is best that you avoid narrow casters and go with wide ones since this will cause less damage.