"Sheesh - is there anything he DOESN'T do?"
How about make money?
Here's my list, somewhat prioritized:
1. Devote one page to each keyword you're targetting.
2. Title tag. If you're selling widgets, the first word in the title tag should be widgets. Don't worry about your company name, the search engines don't care. If you can, repeat variations of the term widgets. For example, widgets, blue widget, red widgets. No more than nine words in the title tag.
3. <h1> tag. Get your keyword in there. If you don't like the look of the default <h1> tag, use CSS to modify the look. So, you'll have <h1 class="h1text>Widgets</h1>
4. Keyword density. Repeat your keyword as often as you can while still making the page read naturally. Keyword density can be anywhere from 2% to 20%.
5. Navigation. Make sure that your site is easily navigable, both for visitors as well as the search engines. Limit the number of links to pages within your site to 100 as the absolute maximum. (Studies have shown that people stop looking at links in menus after seven links, so keep that in mind). If you use images or javascript rollovers for menu links, put straight HTML links at the bottom of your page for the SE's to follow.
6. Links. Submit your site to every directory you can find that's related to your site's niche. Also search for sites related to yours that do link exchanges. Before trading links, though, make sure the site is reputable. Go to
www.seochat.com and use the pagerank lookup. It's up to you if you want to exchange links with a site that doesn't have a pagerank yet or not. But avoid sites that have a greyed-out Pagerank toolbar. Also, check the source code for the links that are on the site you're thinking about exchanging links with. A lot of cheats use javascript "onMousedown" commands to keep the search engines from following the links. It's a stupid practice, but some webmasters think they lose pagerank by having outbound links, so they screw around with that sort of thing. Also, don't count on getting much value from a site that has 100 links on a single page.
Stay away from paid links. Google doesn't like them.
Also stay away from sites that are obviously nothing but links. If there's no real content on the site, it's a link farm.
Don't acquire too many links at once, as it looks unnatural to the search engines, and Google may view your site as a spam site. What's a natural number of links? Look at the top-ranking sites in your niche. Go to Yahoo and do a link:www.mycompetitor.com search to see how many sites link to the competitor. Then find out how long that site has been around. That should give you an idea of how often they've acquired inbound links.
7. Put <meta description = "robots" content = "index, follow"> on every page you want the search engines to look at.
8. Include a site map on your site, with straight HTML links to every one of your pages. Again, don't put more than 100 links total on your sitemap page (including your navigation links). Add more site map pages if you need to.
9. Submit your site to
www.dmoz.com, and then wait six months for your site to appear. If it's not listed by then, go to the dmoz forum for the category you submitted to and politely ask the editor how your submission is coming along.
10. Add new content regularly. If you can add new pages every day or two, that's ideal.
11. Expect to wait a month or so before Google begins to index your site. Expect to wait six months minimum before your site starts to rank for anything.
12. If you have a dynamic site, consider creating static HTML pages for your keywords. You don't have to have these pages in your navigation menu; just have them on your site map page(s).
13. Go to press release sites and write press releases about your company. Don't go for the free releases. Pay a few dollars for the option of having your press release submitted to the search engines. Press releases are great for link value.
14. Check out the wiki's. You may be able to put a link to your site on a relevant page. I've had a problem with one editor, though, who keeps removing my links.
15. Put a link to your site in your sig line on every forum you post on. Also, find some forums that are relevant to your site, post on them from time to time, and have your link in your sig line.
There's still more, but that should get you started.
