The trend towards search engine friendly design 

Designing web pages that are friendly to search engines is no longer a new trend. Many web designers nowadays understand the importance of search visibility. Most have stopped designing websites that are totally developed using flash. Instead, we normally use partial flash elements on websites to make them more dynamic now.

Using search engine friendly design elements can improve your search ranking, especially on MSN. While you should not be overly concerned about every little details [which some customers really do], there are major design elements and techniques that your web designers should use to make the site more SE friendly:

1) Use keyword rich page titles:

Considered as one of the most important on-site ranking factors, page title is used as a main identity by search engines to classify and categorize each web page according to what is displayed on the title. A normal page title should consist of about 70 to 80 characters, nothing less or more. Also, please do not use excessive keywords on your web pages. It is annoying to site visitors, look unprofessional and does not contribute to site ranking at all.

2) Label your images with ALT tag:

In case you are not aware, many different categories of visitors will actually come to your website. They can be normal visitors like you and me, search engine robots, visually handicapped. Some of these visitors are not able to see those images that you display on your website at all. Instead, they are using ALT tag to identify those images. To increase your website accessibility, you should always label the image ALT tag with some meaningful words that can describe the image well.

3) Meta description:

Meta description are still used by search engines to identify the content of a web page. It is a summary of what the page is about. Some primitive search engines also use meta description tag to classify and determine the ranking of the website. Directory editors also may use it for editorial purpose.

4) Using H1, H2 heading tags:

When search engine robots come to visit your website, they do not like to see a whole chunk of mess. According to Google's guideline for webmasters, robots like websites that are well organized in a clear hierachical structure. When you use H1, H2, Bold, Italic tags, this helps robots to understand your website better.

5) Avoid excessive use of Javascript and session ID:

Too much javascript, especially in the navigation may block or cause severe problem for search engine robots to crawl your website efficiently. Also, session ID in the URL such as "PHPSESSID=59291bf6bf97cd17ea3e3ac125378ed8" should always be avoided. If you are going to use fancy design elements, its also better to add a sitemap.

6) Avoid dynamic URL

Dynamic url can be rewritten to static url using Mod rewrite. This is a more advanced SEO technique. For example, www.edlinkmarketing.com/index.php?a=b&c=d may be rewritten into www.edlinkmarketing.com/index-a-b.html, which is a much more friendly form.

Above are some of the design considerations that you should take note of. As a general rule of thumb, do not design your website fully in flash. Also, you may validate your website using W3C compliant tool. This ensures that your website is highly accessible and the html coding is correct.