The following guide is more intended for people who are in that stage of launching their site for the first time or who haven't tried much in the way of promoting it so far. Many of these things you should have already done or thought about as part of building your website.
As always try the bits and pieces you like, skip the bits you don't or have already got in place or done or just aren't relevant to your business.
These headings will eventually be linked to detailed posts with instructions on what to do for each one.
Please note this is VERY much in a draft format at this stage
1. Install a webstats tool. Google Analytics is probably the industry choice.
2. Learn to look at view source for your web page.
3. Work out what niche you want to dominate.
4. Write down a list of keywords and keyword phrases relating to this niche that you want to dominate. Think like a customer.
5. Research these keywords and phrases on Googles Keyword Tool.
6. Think laterally. Experiment. Look at competitors sites and see what keywords they use via view source.
7. Refine and pick 3 or 4 two word phrases you want to dominate.
8. Run a link checker tool across your site - see how much a search engine robot could find.
9. Check / add .htaccess
10. Check / add robots.txt
11. Make sure your site has RSS feeds.
12. Make sure your site has a good site map.
13. Try and use text wherever you can instead of images
14. Try and use text links rather than image-based links for navigation.
15. If you use images make sure that the image is named after one of your keywords or phrases
16. Make sure your images have alt tags
17. Make sure your site passes as many web compatibility checks as possible.
18. Link a common element (eg logo) on ALL pages to site map
19. See if you can improve your base template to move body copy up source code. Go view source and see where your important information appears
20. For dynamic sites implement URL flattening code (worth looking into and easy to add) to make all dynamic URLS look like a html file. Often called Mod rewrite.
21. For any frames pages (if you decide to use any) add a site map and relevant content to the <noframes> tag. You might need some javascript to force the page back into frames if a user stumbles upon it via a direct link from a search engine.
22. Move fonts / positioning / style sheet code to external .css file
23. Style sheet name should reflect keywords targeted
24. Move any JavaScript code to external .js file
25. Create unique meta page titles for all pages targeting your keywords from.
26. Create unique meta keywords for all pages targeting your keywords from. This is now of low value.
27. Create unique meta description for all pages targeting your keywords from.
28. If your site is database driven get your developers to change it so it can generate unique page titles and metadata
29. Increase text content on major site sections - you want to be as text rich as possible
30. Use straight text (html) headings where possible rather than images
31. When you have text as a heading use <h1> tags rather than font size=2 tags
32. Add ALT tags targeting your keywords from 1. to all images
33. Change image names to reflect keywords for site section i.e. name your images after your keywords. eg balloons.jpg to fun_corporate_gifts.jpg
34. Create links from the site map to relevant DMOZ and Yahoo categories
35. Encourage other sites to link to yours where possible
36. Add a robots.txt file to the root directory of your site with allow all robots tag
37. Create a glossary of terms page that contains info about the business and its products and commonly used search terms
38. Create outbound links to major search engines
39. Once you have optimised your site, then submit it to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
40. Create Facebook site
41. Create Twitter site
42. Create Pinterest site
43. Link your RSS feed to Twitter
44. Post selection of products to Facebook site
45. Post selection of products to Twitter
46. Post selection of products to Pinterest
47. Create Google Adwords account
48. Set up Google Adwords campaign
49. Add your products and pricing to comparison shopping engines
50. When you have a little traffic and momentum run a heat-map tracking tool.
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