Between doing market research, drafting mock-ups, and repeatedly asking clients to send you information, web designers can have much to do when designing a website. Which means sometimes even the most basic SEO elements get lost in the shuffle.
Remember, a site that can't be found in a search is useless, regardless of how nice it looks. It's always good to go back and double-check your keyword implementation towards the end of a site design.
1) Don't always take your client's advice on the best keywords for their industry or market. Take their suggestions, but do your own keyword research, because consumers often use different words than people within the business realize or expect.
2) Don't assume your client's competitor's sites are designed well. Their keywords/phrases may or may not be well chosen, so don't just start copying them in an effort to compete. Be careful looking at competitor info.
3) Don't simply choose keywords/phrases for your client's site that are hot in their industry, choose accurate ones that describe what they really do. The whole point of keyword selection (for legitimate business websites) is to get the correct visitors to the site. Traffic that isn't looking for what your client really sells is useless traffic, and will be a waste of their time to deal with.
4) Page titles such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber" are useless to both visitors and search engines.
5) Page descriptions such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber", or even "Joe's Lumber is your #1 source of lumber" are a waste of an important search engine tagline.
6) Use only one or two H1 headlines containing keywords, not dozens of them. In theory you could put the entire contents of a page inside one big H1 tag, but then search engines would see the whole thing as equally (un)important. Focus search engines toward several specific, logical, important elements that contain targeted keywords.
