To help get you on the road to an excellent search engine presence, there are some extremely important SEO features that are needed when having a new website built. Unfortunately, not every web design company would incorporate these vital features into your new website as a matter of course.

So what base level SEO features should you realistically expect to be included into your new website build? Below are five features that any web design company worth their salt should be including in any website package they offer, regardless as to whether or not the package they are offering is a budget one:

1. All meta tags should be completed. Meta description tags should be targeted to each page and not be just the same generic description repeated on every page.

2. In the same vein, all title tags should be correctly completed on a page by page basis with all of the important keywords stitched into the title tag naturally - not spammed by repeating those keywords over and over again.

3. Every images Alt tag should be completed. This helps screen readers for the visually impaired understand what the images are about. The Alt tag will also be displayed in the event of the image failing to load.

4. The robots.txt file should be present and correctly worded. This file tells the various search engine robots which pages they are permitted to index.

5. Every new website needs the canonical URL issue to be addressed. By this I mean that the search engines need to know exactly what URL you want your website to be indexed as. As strange as it seems, it is actually possible for your website to be indexed as more than one URL by the various search engines - for example: yoursite.com/index.html, yoursite.com, yoursite.com with the three W's prefix etc. Being indexed as more than one URL can eventually water down your search engine rankings as your website can be deemed as duplicate content. This canonical URL issue should most definitely be addressed by your Webmaster to avoid any potential future problems with indexing.

Conclusion

So there you have it. 5 base level SEO features that should always be included in every website build, even if the site is built on a budget. Unfortunately many of these features will be left by the wayside, as many web designers view them as an extra as opposed to the norm. Ask if your site will have these features included in the price, if not, you may want to look elsewhere for a company who who are happy to incorporate them.

With any luck the above points will help you get the important SEO features built into your new website to avoid SEO issues later on.

Good luck.