SEO skills are not part of web designers education. Web coders have a great talent of creating the web site customers request. But search engine optimization is a different skill set and one that is often not talked about or put into a design specification.

Here are basic SEO design guidelines I recommend to web designers in the Omaha/Council Bluffs local area:

Use CSS and not nested tables - the code is cleaner and offers web designers a straight forward way to change the look and feel of the site without having to redo table layouts.

URL names that are keyword rich (not because the URL is going to have a huge impact, but if people use the URL as a link to the site it has relevant keywords) . Use a mod-rewrite to adjust the URLs names if the web site is database driven. All those question mark values in the URL don’t always get passed along to the SEs.

Avoid Sessions - If possible, don’t make the site session oriented - at least not for the content that search engines are going to spider. Because each session makes the URL look different, this make search engine optimization real challenging when the URL keeps changing.

Values for ALT-Text - While many designers use programs (Dreamweaver) that may automagically put a place holder for alt-text, someone has to put an actual value in it. Unless you’ve provided your client a backend content management system these values have to be hard coded.

Deep Internal Linking - give the search engine spiders easy accessibility to the pages on the site. Don’t make them work hard to get to that product page that’s in a sub-sub-sub category.  If possible, make destination page only 2 or 3 hops away.

Site Map - seems obvious, but make the site map detailed and work for your client. Now this is an opinion: Sitemaps are for spiders, not for people. A link down at the bottom of the page pointing to a sitemap was not intended for humans, think about it.

These other SEO items are maybe not web designer skills, but designers can impact whether or not they get implemented:

Customized Titles - Want to rank in Google? Look at your competition for the keyword phrase in Title.

Meta Descriptions with targeted keywords. These words are not seen on the page by visitors, but they can show up in search results.

Meta Keywords - these don’t hold much of a value with Google and other search engines, but going through exercise to determine the primary keyword(s) for the page gives focus when creating the content. Don’t spam the search engines (multiple instances of the same phrase), just put the phrase once.

These on-page factors help with SEO, but when it comes to Google - the challenge is really about the off-page factors. But that’s another article.