Good article here about 10 common SEO elements that designers should know about. Article here It's mostly just on-page SEO related stuff that could be completed at the design level, which would obviously satisfy clients and allow them to concentrate on more in-depth optimization. Enjoy!
It's a decent article... I would have replaced several of those with much more important items like: 1) Where possible, organize sites in such a way as to create Theme Pyramids (see Brett Tabke's post 4 down in this thread). It's an old technique but VERY effective ESPECIALLY with Google. This optimizes the flow of PR, but more importantly, what I call "the flow of relevance" around your site. Most site designers (and SEOs) have never even thought about what I like to call "the flow of relevance" around a site. But using Theme Pyramids creates pyramids or verticals or silos in your site where all of the pages in a pyramid are about one particular topic. The deeper you click into the pyramid (farther away from home page you get) the more specific the topics get and more long tail the keywords you target. Each page in the pyramid mainly links up (to page more general about the same topic) and down (to pages more specific about the same topic). Within the pyramid you have pages linking to other pages that are relevant. 2) Where possible, use several <h2> elements (I like 3-6 per page if possible) that reinforce the targeted keyword phrases (and/or slight variations) from the <title>. I like to build pages from components... and each component typically has an <h2>. By component I mean the equivalent of a WP Widget. So if I have a WP blog about SEO and my home page has a <title> of <title>SEO - Search Engine Optimization</title>, instead of my blogroll widget rendering "Blogroll" as a plain text header styled to be bold and bigger, I might render <h2>Other SEO Blogs</h2> as the header for the bloroll on my home page. The header for the categories widget might be rendered as <h2>Related SEO Categories</h2> or just <h2>SEO Categories</h2>. I might render the header of the archives widget as <h2>Our Search Engine Archives</h2>. Then the posts that show up on the home page would probably frequently contain SEO or "Search Engine Optimization" or other words determined thru lexical semantic analysis to be related to those phrases with each post title rendered as an <h2>. I think you get the picture... This goes a long way to helping you rank for keyword phrases from your title and can be done easily with little work and without looking spammy if done tastefully. 3) Do NOT use HTML elements (<font>, etc.) and attributes (align=, size=, etc.) for styling. If you have styling that appears in all of your pages, you are downloading it over and over again w/ each page request. The one exception is <strong>, but it is VERY rare that I use it to bold text in the content of the page. I think it usually looks spammy or detracts from the aesthetics of the page. Use CSS with <div>s instead HTML elements and attributes for styling. And for God's sake place all CSS in external files. It's easier to make global changes to the format of your site. It increases your content:code ratio... It reduces the download time of your pages. There are lots of reasons it is important (not just SEO). 4) Where possible always store Javascript function definitions in external files. Again... It's easier to make global changes to the format of your site. It increases your content:code ratio... It reduces the download time of your pages. There are lots of reasons it is important (not just SEO).