what are the basic key things to make sure the designer does to opti mize seo when getting the site built. Any help would be greatly appreciated
description also counts in some cases, by the way why don't you go for wordpress(blog) that will make your life easier unless your very good at it. Not only that it will help you in indexing your page with search engines fast.
Make sure the images are a good size. Like in Photoshop you could optimize them for the web and it can half the file size but remain in the same quality. You could also make sure that you have good quality titles, descriptions, keywords and also make sure the code is valid etc.