“…Then you get into the problem, and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while…”

“…But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, underlying principle of the problem, and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.”

-Steve Jobs (1984)

1. URL - Key words within a URL may be the single most relevant way to “show up in Google.” Say someone is searching for “chicago web design.” The site www.chicagowebdesign.com is going to have a higher ranking than www.websoulationschicago.com. Google puts high priority to keywords contained in the URL.
2. Headings - Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) play an important rule in SEO. Make sure any section titles are in heading tags. On top of that the lower the heading number, the more relevant it is to search engines. So, and h1 will carry more weight than an h3 tag.
3. <strong> & <em> - Beleive it or not, search engine spider put more weight on keywords that are within <strong> and/or <em> tags.
4. Meta Description - A meta description can have significant impact on your search engine ranking. After all it is what shows up as your description when someone is viewing search results.  One thing to note is that meta keywords are not scanned by search spiders.
5. Alt & Title Attributes - Make sure your images have alt and title tags. Search engines can’t see images, but they can read alt and title tags. On top of that, it makes your site more accessible to the visually impared. This is an absolute must do. Dreamweaver has a helpful featgure that requries you enter an alt tag when inserting an image.
6. Table elements: ,
   , and summary - These 3 tags are in the same boat as the alt and title tag, only these apply to tables. These tags can help your ranking and improve the efficiency in which search engines crawl your page
7. Stylesheet - Include keywords in your stylesheet. Believe it or not this can help your ranking. Having a stylesheet named webdesignchicago.css can help your ranking more than using a stylesheet named styles.css
8. Logo image name - Since your logo is often the first thing crawled on a page by search engine, it is important to have a filename for that logo that includes keywords.

What are you talking about?  Lorem ipsum is a gift from the web gods.  How will I get people to admire and appreciate my beautiful designs if I stop generating ipsum paragraphs and headings.  This is how I use to feel until I read this entry from the book Getting Real by 37 Signals.

Lorem ipsum changes the way copy is viewed. It reduces text-based content to a visual design element — a shape of text — instead of what it should be: valuable information someone is going to have to enter and/or read. Dummy text means you won’t see the inevitable variations that show up once real information is entered…

I know designers hate it when they show clients a design, only to have them ignore the design an focus on the text you put in 5 mintues earlier.  I’ve been there, trying to explain to clients that it’s just “filler” text.  But, if text is an important part of the design, we should spend more time with it and figure out better ways to weave it in.

Perhaps, start your layout with text and then add graphical elements to emphasize the text.  I don’t know the answer, but I do like the idea of people paying just as much attention to what there website says, as to how it looks.

I will say lorem ipsum has its place and use.  But, if we can avoid it for real copy text, we can get a much more accurate picture of how our design will work.