Originally Posted by chrishirst

None of which are anything to do with optimising for search.

actually all those can help with search marketing
you don't want slow pages on your site
sitemaps do help
image size is something to consider, but it goes back to the time it takes to load the page..

Originally Posted by Brandon

actually all those can help with search marketing

No they won't

Originally Posted by Brandon

you don't want slow pages on your site

Why not? some pages will always render at different "speeds".
Has somebody published benchmarks on how "fast a page should render"?

Originally Posted by Brandon

sitemaps do help

With what??

Originally Posted by Brandon

image size is something to consider, but it goes back to the time it takes to load the page..

Images do NOT affect the "load time " it is the render speed ( how quickly the page is visible in the browser) that is affected by the image byte size

Six or seven years ago when the majority of users were on 56k connections, yes, image size was a major concern. Now, unless your users live in a cave halfway up a Peruvian mountain and have no satellite coverage, it is less of a concern

Where are you guys getting this information?

Page Speed:

From Google's Blog

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

If you're targeting or worrying about 1%, you're in the wrong business.

Image alts, keywords, metas, etc, should all be in place BEFORE creating a SEO plan. All good web designers should be implementing this as the "website design", and not additional SEO charges.

Sitemaps should also be included in "website design", as they only provide a tiny fraction of help to SE's.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

Your site has dynamic content.
Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

SEO happens off-site as much as it does on-site. And without me spending a ton of time explaining the basics of SEO, I'd like to refer you to this site, which consistently provides solid information in this area.

http://www.searchengineland.com

Originally Posted by chrishirst

unless your users live in a cave halfway up a Peruvian mountain and have no satellite coverage, it is less of a concern

Have you been Googling my address again??

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

Yes that's all well and good BUT.

what is site speed?

Is is the milliseconds the server takes to deliver the page?
Is it the time a browser takes to render a page? (and every browser may be a little different)
Is it the response time including any lag for the "hops" from client to server.
Is it compared to sites that are hosted:
on the same server?
in the same country?
on the same continent?
in the same marketplace?

Is the "speed" of my website selling "toothpicks made from recycled hardwood" to be compared against Amazon?

Speed can be:
a physical constant such as:
The speed of sound;
The speed of light;

an absolute measure:
100 mph

the duration of an event
10 ms

a relative measure or a perception
quicker, slower, about the same as.


Yes! Of course you should be concerned about the "user experience". But being anally retentive about yet another vague concept is NOT the ideal way to providing YOUR users the best "experience".

When thinking of designing your new website, chances are you're thinking of a website with bells and whistles - flash movies, beautiful pictures, streaming audio - The Works! But these attractive design elements adversely affect can be your search engine rankings.

Take a look at this article by the people leading the way in SEO, here is the link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/24-onsite...unching-a-site

For SEO friendly web design you have to keep in mind On-page optimization techniques. In short use very relevant content, use external CSS and JS and don't use flash.

Lots of great responses in here.
Here are some things to consider for great seo (not in any order):
1. use your metatags
2. use your header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) properly
3. use web safe fonts, or if using html5 you can use the font-replacement method, or if you must use images- use the image replacement method.
4. use alt tags
5. have a sitemap
6. have a sitemap.xml file
7. keyword enrich your site but don't "over-stuff it"
8. Load time - Use Y-Slow plugin (firefox) to see how your site is doing
9. use external .js and .css files
10. Links are good, but don't go overboard with it.
11. Google Analytics

Your business web site has a purpose - to sell your line of products or services. It is important to understand what is going through the minds of online shoppers interested in your products, and to know how to appeal to those people.

For SEO friendly web design avoid use of Flash, do not use Frames, avoid heavy images. Your website should be design in simple HTML with good template and navigate properly..