Search Engine Friendly File And Folder Names
Always use search engine friendly file and folder names on your sites. Be sure to use hyphens and underscores in all your names and preferably have the URLs contain the keyword that relates to the page. For example if the page is about web hosting, then the file name could be web-hosting or web_hosting.

Keyword Rich Domain Name or Subdomain Name
Try to include the main keyword for your site in your domain name, or in the subdomain name if you are using subdomains. Use hyphen separated domain names for search engines to recognize them. For example: web-hosting.com or for a subdomain: web-hosting.mysite.com.

Keyword Research
It's important to do thorough research before deciding what keywords you'll focus on when optimizing your website. Here are some popular tools that you can use:

Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Overture Search Suggestion
http://inventory.overture.com/

Nichebot
http://www.nichebot.com

Word Tracker
http://www.wordtracker.com

Keyword Discovery
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Good Keywords (Free keyword research Software application)
Main website link: http://www.goodkeywords.com

Site Map
Create a site map for your site and submit the site map using Google's webmaster tools. A site map will allow the search engines to easily find all the pages within your website.
Link: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

Use Of H1 Tags
Using H1 tags, and even H2 tags are good for optimization. Be sure you put your website's headlines inside H1 tags. You can use CSS to determine how the tags are displayed or the tag will be very big by default and could make your page look ugly. Using a css file will enable the tag to blend nicely with your design. Be sure your H1 tags are keyword rich.

Menu Links
For further on site optimization be sure that your menu links are keyword rich. Be creative with your menu text titles and have a few of them be actual keywords that relate to your website.

Meta Description
Use a meta description tag. Google actually pulls your meta description tag when spidering your website, and so does Yahoo and MSN. It is also shown in the search engine results on some search engines. Hence it's worth having a well written and keyword rich meta description tag. Keep your description under 200 characters (100 is better). This tag should be placed somewhere in between the head tags on your web page.

Meta Keywords
Not all search engines index meta keywords, but it's still a good idea to have a meta keyword tag just in case it's indexed or have some kind of relevance. This tag should be placed somewhere in between the head tags on your web page.

Unique Titles
Always give each page a unique Title (inside the tags) as well as a unique meta description tag, and unique keyword tag.

Unique Body Content
Do not repeat the same content on too many pages. If this is done, your pages could be placed in Google's supplemental results database. This is not where you want to be, so therefore ensure that each page within your website does have unique body content.

Link Building
You'll need to start having links pointing to you from relevant and popular websites. Research the websites that are your competitors who have achieved high page rank, and see what sites are linking to them, and if possible contact those websites to see if you can have a link as well. Do a search on Google for a keyword that relates to your website. Review the top ten websites, and input this tag in Google for each of the sites. Type in the search box: link:www.sitename.com replacing sitename.com with the site name you are researching. Review all the back links for that particular site and try to acquire link partnerships with the same sites as your competitors.

Paid Directory Submission
Consider submiting to popular paid web directories. The main one is Yahoo. Also consider Business.com, Uncoverthenet.com and Gimpsy.com. This can help with relevancy points by having established paid directories having a link to your site. The fees for these directories range from $40-$299.

Social Bookmarking Sites
For quick indexing into the search engines, submitting to reddit.com and digg.com maybe a worth while task. It can allow the spiders to quickly visit your site and also result in some traffic. Ensure your article or reports are of good value, and never spam these sites. It's important to maintain a good relationship.

SEO for Firefox
This tool allows you to check PR, age of websites, backlinks, edu links, gov links, page links, technorati backlinks, alexa ranking, dmoz links, yahoo directory links and provides whois information. It's a great plugin tool for the Firefox browser. Link: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html If you don't already have the firefox browser, you can download free here
Link: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Quality Hosting Service
This is just a general rule since you have to have as limited downtime as possible. Always research the hosting companies carefully, since downtime can result in a site that is dropped from the search engines if they try to spider and realize that the site cannot be accessed.

Robots.txt
Create a robots.txt file to restrict the content that can be indexed by the search engines. This can limit the "duplication" factor that can occur if you have more than one page that is similar.

See more here: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/

About the author:

Henrik Wanner-Olsen has been working behind the scenes at a number of websites for many years. He also owns a number of domains and spends most o his time on the internet.

http://www.softwaremagic.org