Research

Research and select keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to the content of your website. This means identifying the words and phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for your products or services, not the words you would use. For example, when potential customers call you for the first time, what words do they use? Are they the same words that keep appearing in your company literature? If so, start with those. And, of course, if you have search functionality on your site, grab a good server log analyzer and see what people are looking for there!

more on keyword research

Content

Great content is the best revenge. You have better chances of being listed by search engines if you provide great content and never submit your site than if you submit it but provide poor content that never changes and grows. So, make sure your content:

• is useful, interesting, and relevant to your audience;
• is unique—duplicating content from other sites and within your site can get you penalized;
• keeps growing—revisit and touch up any content older than a few months;
• is timely—set up a daily, weekly, or monthly publishing schedule and meet it;
• contains your selected keywords on the page—one or two in the headlines and sub-heads, one in the title, and sprinkled naturally through the paragraphs; do NOT lump them all in a list since search engines count such gratuitous manipulation as a strike against you.

Design

Keep it simple. Make it easy to read , easy to navigate, consistent throughout, and fast to download.
The bottom line is: your visitors want a useful site that is easy to use and fast to access. Anything that slows them down will work against you, no matter how cool your site looks.

And remember that your target audience includes directory reviewers with the power to include your website in their listings, and owners of high-ranking websites with the power to link to your site. These people have to make judgments quickly. One red flag and you’re out.

Code + Technology

Keep it slim. Take a good look at your HTML document and if you have more code than text content, do something to fix the balance. Add content and streamline the code. To help, we’ve written up specific suggestions on how to optimize your HTML. And by the way, don't lose sleep over those META tags. They used to be the popular means to make your site search engine friendly. Not any more. In fact, you shouldn’t be surprised if Meta tags are not as useful as you think.

Keep it fast. Some spiders are on a tight schedule, and if your site takes too long to download or examine, they’ll move on without indexing the whole site.

Keep it friendly. Beware of "features" that will hurt your rankings. Most search robots will see your website much as a text browser would. This means that features such as frames, Flash, JavaScript, DHTML, session IDs, and cookies, may prevent spiders from accessing the content of your site. Some of the features that will actively keep crawlers out will also piss off those directory editors you want to court. Not to mention that they keep some of your target audience out as well. Including these technologies should be a well-reasoned decision that balances both the positive and the negative aspects of the feature.

more on code optimization
more on Meta tags

Link, Link, Link

Good linking is currently the best way to juice your Google ranking. Google used to be all there was—not only did it power its own site, but it provided results for Yahoo! as well, meaning that the rank Google gave you was your site's rank for about 85% of searches on the web. But as of early 2004, Yahoo! uses its own technology, and Microsoft and Amazon have begun making strong entries into the search engine field. They are all trying to provide results that are most useful to the user, and in this Google still leads the pack. Google does this by counting the votes for your site—votes that already are out there on the web. They call it PageRank: the more high-ranking sites that link to you, the more useful you must be.

We’ve compiled some of the most useful tips on how to link so Google likes it, but in this new search engine arena getting better ranking boils down to: link for your users, not for the spiders. Do that, and the search engines will figure out a way to put your useful site in front of their users.

more on linking

Host It, Submit It

Your site has great content that makes it useful, a clean design that helps it get listed in directories, code that is fast and clean, and links that firmly embed it in the community. Now, get a good host with reliable uptime and fast service. If your site is down or slow when the crawlers come by, what good will all your SEO work do you? You may literally be kept out of a search engine database for months.

Now submit your website to a few, reputable search engines and directories. Don’t use automated programs that promise to submit your site to thousands of search engines for $30. Such programs could be submitting multiple times to the same engine, causing you to be seen as a spammer and getting your site permanently banned from those engines. There are easier ways to destroy all your work, and for less than $30.