1.create great content: Give your users good reasons to come back and to bookmark, tag, and link to your site. If you do only this and nothing else, your site will rank well without any specific optimization activity.
2 Lay the right foundations. Host your site with a fast and flexibleprovider, and structure the site symmetrically and with a logical domain name, directory structure, and filenames.
3 Do everything you can with the assets under your control in terms of on-page SEO, but realize that this only gets you to the 240 Getting to the top start line in the race for decent rankings. SEO is not simply an exercise in decent copywriting.
4 Spend more time on directory submissions, article writing, and online press releases. Provide a hook. Your site must be newsworthy, funny, or controversial, or at the very least full of great resources.
5 By all means use paid advertising, but only as an adjunct to a decent organic search campaign (rather than the other way around). Save money by targeting long-tail terms, tuning matchdrivers, and crafting decent landing pages.
6 If your business has a local angle, put some focus into local directory listings, geo-targeting, language optimization, and Google Earth/KML optimization. As the web gets more local, your investment will pay dividends.
7 If you can, create a business advisory blog and make it easy for others to tag and syndicate your content and products. Increase your presence on wikis, lenses, and other social networking sites to futureproof your rankings.