(1) Choosing the right keyword and placing it

• The most important step before starting is to make an intelligent guess of the keywords that the people might use to search the site. It is no use ranking high for a keyword that less than 10% of the people use to search.
• Instead of using single word it is better to have the keywords as a short phrase (of 2 -3 words).
• It is a good practice to include geographical region like city/ country name in the keywords.
  

Search engines give importance to location and frequency of keywords. Words appearing at the top of a document and occurring more frequently are considered important. 

So it is good to

• Incorporate the keywords in the title of the document.
• Put the content having the most occurrences of keywords in the top of the document body as html text (not images).

(2) Title

• Search engines give importance to HTML title so it is necessary to have a well thought of title (maximum of 40 characters long). It is a time well invested
• Title should be placed at the top of the document before anything else
• As the title is displayed in the search results a site without a title or with an irrelevant title like "Newpage 1" might rank high but still not be accessed.

  Syntax :

  <title> The title of your site </title>
  

(3) Metatags

Some search engines rely on metatags for ranking the pages. Metatags should be incorporated in the document and placed after the title tag. 
Keywords should be placed in order of priority in the meta keywords tags

Syntax :

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, ...">
<meta name="description" content="short description of your web page">

(4) Hyper text ( text linked to some page)

Hypertext is given more weightage than ordinary text. So

• Have text links as far as possible. If the design requires using images as links ,text links should also be incorporated at the bottom of page.
• Uncommon words count more than common ones so it is useful to be specific wherever possible. Phrases like "about us" can be replaced by organization name. Phrases like "click here" can be replaced by the content the link points to.
• It is a good practice to have keywords as links and vice versa.
• Text links must have title links describing the content the link points to.
  

(5) Images/graphics/audio/video

• All image and graphics must have meaningful alt tags defined.
• Graphic/image files should be appropriately named so that they get indexed for media search facility provided by some search engines.

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