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SEO is massive and many businesses both old and new are using SEO services to boost the impact of their business. Whilst this does not directly relate to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) it is clear that many new businesses cannot explore this type of marketing and promotion.

As a Web Designer this means that you need to keep up with the ever changing world of SEO. Like with many industries your competitors may already be ahead of the game but if you are a freelance worker or small company you should have the flexibility to catch up with them. By knowing more than the standard web design group with your SEO knowledge then you will be more appealing to potential clients.

By using some standard SEO techniques and tactics into your web design will also make your websites easier to find which is great for both you and your clients. Here are some simple things you can do to add a touch of SEO to your website designs:

1. Make sure your code passes the W3C validation checks for both XHTML and CSS. This will help your website be crawled easily by search engines as well as having the site display correctly across most browsers. In addition to this it also opens up the opportunity to submit your website designs to some of the top CSS design galleries, which in turn will give your website more exposure.
2. Speed has always been a very important factor when it comes to the usability of a website. On top of this the speed of a website has now become a ranking factor in Google. Using GZip to compress text, compressing images, combining CSS files and minifying JavaScript files are all going to help the speed of your site.
3. Use Google’s keyword tool to determine the most common phrases that people use to search for your clients website. You can make your website easier to find by using some of these keywords in the titles of your web pages. On top of this it will be clear to both users and search engines what market you clients website is in.

With Google’s confirmation that the time taken to load a web page is now a ranking factor web developers and designers have been prompted to sit up and pay renewed attention site performance. Here are just a handful of factors that todays web developers need to keep in mind.

Most of todays web pages are made up of a collection of components including CSS files, javascript, images and often movies. For fast page load times it is essential to minimise the number of these elements and therefore the number of HTTP requests that the browser must make in order to render a page.

It is well known that about 80% of the end users response time is spent waiting for a page to download completely. It is well known that this waiting time can prompt visitors to leave an ecommerce site and visit a faster loading competitor. This time can be reduced by using a content delivery network to serve up the static content, such as javascript and css files. A content delivery network is basically a collection of servers setup in various geographic locations to efficiently deliver content to users.

As web designs become richer and more engaging to the end user they require an increasing number of components including javascript, images and maybe Flash. On a first visit a number of HTTP requests are made in order to download these elements. If these are cached then there is less to download on a subsequent visit and this can be controlled using the ‘Expires’ header. This header is commonly used for images but it should be routinely employed for all elements including Flash and javascript files.

Compression is another technique that every web developer should be using. GZIP is one of the most popular compression tools, supported by most browsers, it can reduce the size of many elements by as much as 70%.

There are many additional techniques that can aid not only the search engine optimisation of web pages but will enhance the users experience. These include putting stylesheets at the top of pages and scripts at the bottom; minifying both javascript and CSS files; putting javascript and CSS into external files; reducing the number of DNS lookups and avoiding redirects. Good luck.