Regardless of what your site is about, the one constant which defines a successful web presence is traffic. After all, there’s not much benefit in having a top-flight design if no one will be seeing it. Bringing targeted visitors to your page is the whole point of the exercise, and search engine referrals often account for 70-80% of unique hits to a given page.

Considering the importance of SEO, you might assume it is a top priority for any professional website designer. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Many talented designers, particularly those who received formal training, tend to neglect the search engines when creating sites.

The first step in being friendly to a search engine (SE) starts long before the first line of code is written… in fact, it begins with registering a quality domain name. Since Google and other SE’s factor in the domain when ranking a site for relevant keywords, this decision should be carefully considered.

A quality domain is short (under 10 letters), pronounceable and meaningful, includes the most important words relating to your site, and has the .com, .net or .org extension, unless you only serve one country. Of course, your choice will be limited to names which have not yet been claimed, so it may take a bit of hunting to find the right one.

Once you’ve registered the name and secured a hosting plan suitable for your projected activity, you’re ready to select your web designer. Be sure to discuss your marketing plans with prospects, and probe to learn their knowledge of and attitude toward search engines. Avoid designers who express indifference to this key tool for garnering visitors…or your competition will be happy to serve them instead.

When examining portfolios, investigate the aspects of a site which can affect SEO. Here are some typical search engine follies:

Text-to-Code Ratio: Maybe the site is loaded with bells and whistles…but how long did it take to load? Files that are top-heavy with machine code tend to do poorly with search engines, which generally index only text and image alt tags.

Meta tags: Do the title and description tag relate to the content of the site, containing the most vital keywords? Are they too short or identical for each page of the site? Are they included at all?

“I” Frame: This technology allows different parts of a page to be generated from multiple server files, but is a disaster for search engines, who read each part of the page as a completely different location. In other words, your sidebar appears to the robots as a different page from the main body and is ranked separately. Avoiding I-Frames is the first lesson in SEO 101, so if a designer seems enamored with this scheme, you might wish to move on.

String URLs: Search engines are getting better at responding to long web addresses, but because the text in the uniform resource locator (URL) of each page can help with ranking, a major opportunity is being missed if your URLs are not “search-engine friendly.” Humans, as well, tend to respond better to an orderly link composed of meaningful words rather than a random string of numbers, letters and punctuation.

There’s more to a site than being indexed by search engines, and many sites find success despite neglecting these factors. The question is, in the race to the top of the search engine results, can you afford to be without every edge?