Being a web designer myself, I know firsthand what they teach you in college about being a good designer. While I learned all of important design concepts like color theory, importance of graphics and white space, ect ect, I came away knowing nothing about how to actually design a site to get ranked in search engines.

Because of lack of training in design schools, there are many, many web design companies out there today that know nothing about designing a web page properly.

It wasn’t until I started doing some research that I realized there was a whole world of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that I didn’t know about. Most designers love to make your site aesthetically pleasing. Maybe they use newer technologies like Flash design or really graphic intensive pages. While these techniques make your site look pretty they are not practical if you ever want a visitor to find your site in a search engine.

Here are some basic concepts to learn before beginning your website design.

**Flash**

I know it’s tempting to have an all flash site because lets face it they look really awesome. The problem with having an all flash site though, is that it is basically nonexistent to search engines.

A flash source file is embedded in html and therefore offers no content to which search engine spiders can look at to rank you. Unless you are already well known in your particular industry or have a very identifiable brand (think Pepsi or BMW) then you should not use an all flash site.

But what if you really, really want to have flash? Here are some ways around this problem.

First, you can create two websites for your visitors. An HTML version and a Flash version. You can let your visitor decide where to go. That way you won’t leave them frustrated if they have a dial up connection and are not surfing with broadband. There is nothing that will tick your potential customer off faster than having to wait ten minutes just to view your fancy flash intro. By having both versions available you also give search engine spiders a content rich HTML site so they can rank you accordingly.

Secondly, you can add flash components in your main site to give off some cool effects without taking forever to download. For instance, I have seen a lot of websites lately where top header portion of their site is made in flash or their buttons are done in flash to make them stand out more. These are two good ways to use flash without overdoing it. Just make sure that your body copy is keyword rich to offset flash.

**Keyword Placement**

This next part assumes that you already have researched and gathered targeted keywords to work with. If you have not done keyword research for your services or products you are selling, then you have some work to do before this next step. You can check out http://www.westmarketing-design.com/articles.htm for more information on doing keyword research.

There is a phrase that you will hear in SEO world and that is “keyword rich text”. This simply means that when you write your body copy for your website that you need to word it a certain way so that you include your keywords. Now that doesn’t mean that you insert a keyword every other word. The search engine spiders consider that to be spam. What it means is that you give your body copy a lot of thought, making sure you have keywords placed within your copy that make sense to overall service or product that you are selling.

Here is an example of a keyword rich paragraph selling an information product on public speaking. The keywords are in quotes.

Are you interested in becoming a better "public speaker" or improving your "public speaking skills"? You can become a "paid public speaker" and make lots of money for "speaking in public" to a wide variety of audiences. Learn all latest "public speaking tips" and tricks, including learning how to "overcome stage fright" and "add humor" to your presentation.

All of those keywords were researched and found to be very targeted to phrase “public speaking”. Now I went a little overboard in my keywords for example, but you get idea.

There is another phrase called “keyword density”. This refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase is found in one website page for every 100 words.

When a person goes to a search engine like Google or others, they type in a word or phrase that they want information on. This is what we call a keyword. For instance if person was looking to buy a new golf club, he might type in 'golf clubs' or 'golf shop' or another variation. So if you were a golf store you would want to have those and other related keywords within your site.

So what if you understand importance of keywords but don't do any keyword research? Instead you simply think about your product or service and come up with keywords that you think people will search for? At first this might sound like a good idea but in reality you risk losing many potential customers.

What do you think happens if you pick a bunch of words or phrases that people aren't actually searching for? Or you don't think of all hundreds of other keywords that relate to your product or service and therefore lose potential clients?

You might have best of intentions when thinking of your own keywords, but it's better to do a thorough keyword search before beginning any website project.

There are a few different places that you can perform these keyword searches.