SEO is a process. You can’t just start off blindly and hope it works out down the road. You have to plan ahead so you can implement good SEO at every stage of your project. Following are the bare basics you need to implement from day one.

Keywords

You must do extensive research to find not only which keywords are good bets for traffic, but which ones you actually have a chance of ranking for. Chasing the long tail is the proven way to get rankings and drive traffic to your site.

Titles and Meta Tags

After you choose your keywords you msu ensure your website is correctly formatted and that all the proper elements like H1, H2 etc have been incorporated into each web page. Also make sure that all images are properly tagged for crawling, and surrounded by keyword rich text.

Content

Your content whould be informative, captivating, well written, and free from typos – and of course, keyword optimised according to your prior research. There should be a balance between the relevance of the content and the keyword density – don’t get carried away and stuff your page or resort to hiding keywords in white on white text or other black hat tricks – this can get you kicked off the SERPs!

Links

Categorise the links on your web pages. You have essential and non essential links, the non essential links including the no-follow property inserted into the <a href=>. This keeps you from bleeding out PageRank, or having paid ads show up as links that are paid for and causing you trouble. You should distribute your links evenly across your site, and not waste them all on the home page, Deep linking is preferable than having fifty links all pointing to your one landing page!

Site Map

A site map not only helps the search engines index of all your web pages, but helps in even distribution of links across the site. It should be user firendly as well,with a link to it from the bottom of every page.

Once you have begun your site the right way, keeping it easy to navigate and indexed by search engines should be easy. Don’t cut corners, and you won’t have to go back and redo stuff later on.