Many small scale design firms or freelancers don’t provide Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as their main service. However, web designers should try to create search engine friendly websites to eave scope for better SEO techniques later in the future. Apart from providing a good, flexible, scalable markup and organized, neat css, try to make integrate the following basic steps into your sites:

1. Have descriptive headings and titles throughout the site
2. Make sure the client provides copy that’s optimal and makes for clear for web reading
3. Have an easy to navigate (sometimes easy to remember), clean URL structure
4. Keep your site-map organized
5. Set-up google analytics, webmaster tools for xml sitemaps etc
6. Include useful META descriptions
7. Keep your images, filenames, titles and alt tags optimized
8. Consider the most common 404, 403 and 500 website errors and handle them appropriately
9. Resolve old URLs, if applicable
10. Use neat, semantic mark-up. Keep content (HTML) and design (CSS) separate

The good thing is, a designer/developer can manage to incorporate these steps with a fundamental knowledge of SEO. Popular web design, development website Site point (http://www.sitepoint.com/ultimate-seo-checklist/) has put up a detailed SEO integration checklist that will help you learn the fundamentals.