WRITE UNIQUE CONTENT (HIGH PRIORITY)
Unique content is important too. You need to provide content that has different information than what is on other sites and other Web pages.
ADD NEW CONTENT ALL THE TIME (HIGH PRIORITY)
Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings.
CREATE A GREAT KEYWORD PHRASE (HIGH PRIORITY)
The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page. You shouldn’t try to optimize your entire site to one keyword phrase – instead focus on writing pages for specific keywords and phrases.
CHOOSE A PHRASE THAT IS POPULAR, BUT NOT TOO POPULAR (HIGH PRIORITY)
When trying to decide on a keyword phrase, you want to find one that is popular but not extremely popular. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the reality is that extremely popular keywords are very desirable and so very competitive. It’s better to try to optimize for keywords that you can rank higher. You’ll get more pageviews from a less popular keyword when you’re on the first or second page of the search engines, than from a super popular keyword that you only make it to page 50 of search engines.
WRITE AN ACCESSIBLE SITE (HIGH PRIORITY)
Accessible HTML is accessible to both search engine spiders and screen readers. The more accessible you make your pages, the easier it will be for search engines to read and rank your pages.
The title tag is one of the most important tags on your Web page. And placing your keyword phrase in the title tag, preferably at the beginning, is very important to get that phrase into the search engines. Plus, that puts your keyword phrase as the link in the search engine index.
USE THE KEYWORD PHRASE IN YOUR URL (HIGH PRIORITY)
Even if you can’t get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.
USE YOUR KEYWORD PHRASE A LOT, BUT NOT TOO MUCH (HIGH PRIORITY)
The ratio of your keywords to the rest of the text on your page is called the keyword density. It’s important to repeat your keywords in your document, but not too much. Keyword density should be between 3 and 7% for your primary keyword phrase and 1-2% for any secondary keywords or keyword phrases.
USE YOUR KEYWORD PHRASE IN HEADLINES (HIGH PRIORITY)
Headline tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are a great place to use your keyword phrase and secondary keywords. Search engines recognize that headlines are more important than the surrounding text, and so assign greater value to keywords found there.
USE YOUR KEYWORD PHRASE IN ANCHOR TEXT OF LINKS (HIGH PRIORITY)
Link text is another great place to put your keyword phrase. Links stand out on most Web pages, and so are given higher priority than surrounding text.
ASK OTHER PEOPLE FOR LINKS TO YOUR PAGE (HIGH PRIORITY)
A great way to get inbound links is to simply ask for them. But remember that excessive cross-linking can be viewed as spammy, so be careful about trading links or otherwise buying links on external sites.
TRY TO GET LINKS FROM REPUTABLE SITES (HIGH PRIORITY)
Reputable sites that link to you will increase your reputation. After all, if a reputable site feels that your site is valuable enough to link to, that means that your page has more value. You can tell if a site is considered reputable both by how high it appears in search engines and it’s Google PageRank. Also, .edu sites have a higher reputation because they represent schools and universities.
TRY TO GET LINKS FROM SIMILAR SITES (HIGH PRIORITY)
Inbound links from sites similar to your own are important as well. This indicates that your site does have content related to that topic. Plus, it indicates that your competition finds your site valuable, and that gives your site more credibility
TRY TO GET LINKS FROM .EDU, AND .GOV SITES (HIGH PRIORITY)
Sites that are on .edu and .gov top-level domains have a large amount of credibility because they are very difficult to get. So if you can get the designers of those sites to link to you, that gives your site more credibility as well.
Brian Phelan 