Web designers should actually be forced to include SEO in their packages, and quite frankly it should be part of any web design course.

The reason I say this, is I have dealt with quite a few clients in the last week or so and all of their websites were built in flash or images. Now although these sites look really beautiful, they are not search engine friendly at all because the search engines cannot read flash or images.

The search engines need text to understand what the site is about so that they can rank it accordingly, so content is vital.

Seriously, before hiring a web designer make sure they have a good understanding of SEO, or you are just going to waste your hard earned cash and have to rebuild the site from scratch.

Here are a few things you should ask the web designer before getting your site built.

• Your site needs to have clear hierarchy or site structure, and each page should be reachable from at least one page on your site.
• Meta Tags should be used on all the pages, and must include a Title Tag, a Description tag and a Keyword Tag.
• You must have a sitemap for all your pages and a link to the site map must be on every single page of your website. If your website has a lot of pages then break the site map down into different sections.
• Your site must include space for content; a web page should have at least 400 words of text and cannot just have flash or images. 
• If the site is dynamic and your url pages end in /?catergory_233747 or something like this make sure they know how to do a url rewrite, so the url ends up looking like this /catergory/electronics.php.
• When using images make sure they know what an alt attribute is as you should assign a description to each image you have on your website.
• A robot.txt file should be used so that certain pages on your site are not crawled or indexed, and these pages are usually the style sheets, faqs, forms, etc. 
• Your website must work and display correctly in all the different web browsers.

These are the basic’s to creating a search engine friendly website, but I need to stress to you that a website without content is no good to you, so before you enter into an agreement with the web designer make sure they have a clear understand of the above.