Since we are humans, we should remain so in whatever job we do. It is what I believe in life. Never make your priority anything but Human Relationships. And remember: The opposite of Love is not hate, it is indifference". Hence, What differentiates a technician from a Professional or Specialist is how far s/he could reach others. So, My first advice in SEO is to focus on People as much as you focus on Search Engines.
2- Use Long-Tail Keywords. For 2 reasons: first, You cannot afford short tail keywords and second because they are too broad and will not be relevant to your activity in terms of accurracy.
3- Identify a Theme for your site
4- Use Categorization. Make a tree, a Hierarchy Structure for what you are offering to help both your visitors and SE Robots to identify your content without being lost.
5- Compare your Keywords and Trends via Google Insights. It will really help you
6- Before deciding which keywords to use or put in your list, do your research in their attributes (in terms of relevance, volume, and competition) Of course you can always use the KW Tool of Adwords
7- And to know how difficult the KW will rank, simply use pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty
8- Keep records on used KWs in a KW distribution Spread Sheet where you show in which pages they are utilized and the website hierarchy (URL, KW, Title, Meta tags, description, ads for PPC advertising)
9- Test KWs via PPC (Buying a KW for a period of time then monitoring it)
10- Although search engines prefer text, Do Not ignore the fact that humans prefer pictures and videos. So do not ignore media but when using them (moderately) remember to add text description to them (img alt - img src - description - title - or subtitles if applicable)
11- Your Page Description is what users find under your site title. So make it appealing, simple, relevant, and of course catchy and compelling to urge your visitor to come to you
12- Try to use the same KWs and Theme you chose for your project in the H1 Header Tag
13- Use MicroFormating from schema.org to add an understood description for the nature of your content by the Search engine (whether it is a page of contacts, recipes, catalog, or any thing)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Schema.org is an initiative launched on 2 June 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo! (the operators of the then world's largest search engines) to “create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.” On 1 November Yandex (whose search engine is the largest one in Russia) joined the initiative. They propose using their schemas and microdata to mark up website content with metadata about itself. Such markup can be recognized by search engine spiders and other parsers, thus gaining access to the meaning of the sites). The initiative started with a small number of formats, but the long term goal is to support a wider range of schemas. The initiative also describes an extension mechanism for adding additional properties. A mailing list is provided, for discussion of the initiative. 14- Create an XML sitemap and a video sitemap for the video content (you can simple use www.sitemap.com)
15- Use the SEOmoz On Page optimization Tool to optimize your KWs Performance
16- Utilize the Users Generated Content by site visitors (comments, reviews, or complains) to enhance your service
17- Use the REL Canonical Metatags to tell the Search Engines which URLS are preferred and which to ignore to prevent indexing duplication which would harm your SEO and PR
18- Respect your landlord and when you move tell him by Implementing re-direction rules when content is moved. (302 for temporary movement, and 301 for permanent movements)
19- If a page is not found, what do you expect from the visitor? you decide how the 404 not found page should look like. (add internal links for easy navigation and a search bar or 301 permanent redirect)
20- Compare your site's performance with others (either competitors or sites with similar activities) through pro.seomoz.org/campaigns
21- Search Engines will appreciate it if you tell them that you are having a Paginated content (like a list of products distributed on more than one page) by using the Rel="next" & Rel="prev"
22- They will also love you if you tell them more about your geo-taging (whom do you target?) by using the hreflang="fr-CA" for instance
23- How about your site's mobile version? is it User-Friendly? check that out on Google's nice tool HOWTOGOMO.com
23- Get familiar with the important analysis tools (Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture Site Catalyst, Web Trends, and Coremetrics)
24- Have not you submitted your site to Google and Bing webmaster tools YET? of course you did I was just checking ;)
