When you are designing a site, you may think you are designing it for yourself, or for you customers. While this is true, you also need to be designing it for search engines. If your site is not search engine friendly, then it is likely that you are the only one who is ever going to see it. SEO and web design should be hand-in-hand.
Carefully researching what elements are necessary for good ranking on the major search engines is just good sense. The elements that Google, for instance, requires for good ranking are ones that need to be incorporated right into the design of your site. And doing these things while you are building the site is a lot easier than having to go back and re-design parts in order to please search engine bots later.
Search engines such as Google have directions as to how to SEO your pages and later, they have software to use in order to check all the different elements to see if they are good. There are forums dedicated to SEO and web design where you can ask questions of experts, and there are certainly classes online you can take to teach you SEO. Some hosting sites such as GoDaddy have SEO checkers as well.
So there is a lot of help out there for you when it comes to SEO and web design. Avail yourself of all the information you can find and then use it. You won’t regret it when your site is on the first page of a major search engine such as Google!