You’ll want to watch this video from Maile Ohye at Google for more great tips. Just click the video at the bottom of this post or watch it online: http://youtu.be/El3IZFGERbM.
Here are my tips interspersed with those from Maile:
1. Decide if you are going to show your website as http://www. or simply http:// alone. Whichever one you chose set up a 301 direct for the other on your server. This prevents Google from indexing your pages as duplicates.
2. Make sure to do a background check on your domain to make sure it was not used by spammers.
3. Make sure to set up your Google Webmaster Control panel account. Google will advise you of problems with your website here and you can also check the crawl, search queries that trigger your site and also submit new page URLs for indexing.
4. Make sure to implement Google Analytics. You’ll want to make sure to track your success online.
5. Make sure you are developing your site for your readers. Make sure your navigation is practical for your audience. Keep your pages short and on one topic only.
6. Define what a conversion means for you. Is it a purchase, a lead, or newsletter sign up. Ask for a conversion on every page.
7. Make sure you use appropriate keywords on every page. By keeping only one topic on a page, you can better keep your keywords to a fairly narrow focus.
8. Make sure to use keywords in the file name as lower case and hyphen (not underscore) separated.
9. Don’t use click here. Include descriptive anchor text when you link out and link to internal site pages.
10. Do not hire SEOs that guarantee a site ranking. Maile says that businesses cannot guarantee any Google rankings so don’t be fooled into purchasing services from bogus promises.
Make sure to watch the video below for even more great tips.