1. When you begin a website design, include an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plan. This way the graphic designers will have a list of keywords for each page, matching the keywords to the theme and design and ultimately ranking highly with search engines.
Tip: If someone tells you they can "get your ‘site’ on the first page of Google, be concerned. Google is not returning ‘site’ results, they are returning PAGE results. Your SEO person, or team, is diligently optimizing each page of your site for a select few keywords.
2. SEO takes time. A long time. The decision to use an outside SEO company needs to be done early in the website -building/optimization process.
3. Love your keywords…and their relevance. Paying top dollar for ‘apples’, when you are selling macintosh apples from your farm will hurt when you pay for clicks from people searching for Ipods, the Big Apple, Gwyneth Paltrow’s kid, apple pies…be very specific.
4. Remember all your pages…spend time developing keywords for ‘secondary’ pages; "deep linking" improves your rankings.
5. To expand on secondary pages, genereate links into your secondary pages with tools, content, articles, etc.
6. Try to get links that use keywords or keyword phrases instead of your domain name (yes, it works).
7. Submit your site. Google (Webmaster Tools) and Yahoo (Site Explorer) are important; so is a sitemap.
8. You are not finished after one go-’round. You are dealing with the living, breathing, world wide web. The time needs to be taken to evaluate the current strategies; imoplement an analytics program to track what traffic is organic verses other traffic.
