Designing a new website can be exciting, but often times companies pay too much attention on the look of the site and not enough on the marketing functionality.

As I always say...you can have the best looking website on the planet but it won't do you any good if no one is going to it. Here are a few tips you should look for.

1. Your web designer should first design your site using tabeless layout. You would think this is pretty standard these days, but I can' t believe how many sites we still look at that utilize tables for layout. Search engines have a tough time crawling through nested tables.

2. The less javascript in your navigation the better. If your site utilizes drop downs, make sure your web developer is using a CSS based structure. Search engines have a hard time crawling javascript.

3. Minimal flash. Even though search engines say that they crawl flash now, I have yet to see a flash based website at the top of Google for any given term other than the sites web address.

4. Make sure your site has a robot.txt file. This file tells the web crawlers which pages to crawl on your site.

5. XML sitemaps are a must. XML is the format that Google, Yahoo & Bing prefer you submit your pages to them in. They are not for humans to read, but search engines eat them up. Note. you must submit your XML sitemap to the search engines manually.

6. A search engine friendly architecture. The way that a developer sets up your architecture is critical to how your pages will get crawled.

7. Have a CMS (Content Management System). This is not critical for your site to rank on search engines, but it allows you to add, edit delete pages on the fly without knowing any code. This functionality is crucial for you to effectively market your site.

8. Targeted Meta Tag descriptions. Meta tags are not the most important element for SEO these days, but they still show up in the search engine results. So it is important to craft them in a way that describes the page effectively. Example - If a page that you were trying to rank for was targeting the term Web Design Buffalo NY, then in your meta description your pages should mention it.

9. Search Engine friendly URL's. Having all kinds of code such as =? or catid= in your url structure is not good for search engines. Clean human readable URLs are key.

10. Site usability. This doesn't really have much to do with search engines, but more how people will use your site.  Having too much clutter and poorly organized items on the page will not turn your visitors into customers.

Hope those help. See you next year.