Google uses hundreds of different signals and criteria to rank your website. There are many overlooked SEO considerations that people often miss when designing a website. Work with an SEO expert to develop a cohesive optimization strategy before you begin any work on your site.

Keyword research

Good keyword research is essential to the success of a successful of any website marketing campaign. A descriptive, yet keyword rich domain name is imperative to your success. Choose keywords for your content that are relevant to your business or industry. You want to have terms that have a good search volume but are not too initially competitive.

It takes time and effort to go after high competition phrases. A good strategy is to have more immediate, attainable keyword goals and get ranking for those first. Continue to revisit your targeted keywords as markets and search patterns fluctuate often.

Take the time to work with your SEO specialist to ensure a proper selection of terms to target. Your targeted keywords will need to be included in the page title, the meta description tag and in the heading elements and content of your site and will be the primary factor in determining your rankings in search engines.

An analysis needs to be performed of the competitiveness of your keywords against who is currently in the top ranked positions for those same terms in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This will provide an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your current and potential competitors which you may be able to exploit to your own success.

Meta Tags

Once you have developed a list of keywords to target, implement these in to your website HTML code. This is one of the most crucial areas of SEO that often get overlooked.

Page Title: (while technically not a meta tag) is the first thing that search engine bots look at when attempting to classify and index your site. It carries the most weight for SEO and must be relevant to the content of your page and site as well. A title tag should be no more than 165 characters, otherwise the extra text will be truncated and show as 3 dots ("...").

Meta Description: This is the description that shows in the search results. Have a clearly worded tag line that states exactly who or what you are and what you are providing. The description must be less than 155 characters and should include your most important keywords that you are targeting.

Meta Keywords: While this tag is not considered crucial to SEO anymore, it is included for best practices. Do not use more than 8-10 keywords (300 characters) and make sure that the same words appear in the content of the page they are being used on.

Content

Google has always stated that content is paramount for rankings. The content of your site not only lets your viewers know what your site is about, but it is what the search engine bots use to classify your site. The newest algorithm update from Google means now more than ever, well written, original textual content is mandatory for all onsite and offsite web content. Failure to provide relevant content carries the risk of incurring ranking penalties from Google.

Create approximately 500 words of well written, concise content for your homepage that clearly defines your product or services. The homepage is usually the first one that visitors will come to and is your first, best chance to turn them from a visitor in to a customer.

Use clearly defined heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) to separate content in to clearly defined sections. Not only will this help with visual clarity for your readers, but it will help Google to know how to index your site.

Develop clear, relevant content on your landing pages as well. A landing page is any page that a visitor is brought to through an external source (from a link in an article, a twitter link, forum post, etc). These internal pages are just as important as the main page and cannot be neglected.

Link Building

Work with an SEO company to determine an effective link building strategy to build back links to your website. While Google uses hundreds of factors in determining the ranking of your site, Page Rank is the primary source of information that they use for positioning.

For the most part, PR is based upon the number of sites that link back to your website. This builds up the relative authority of your domain, which builds up "trust"; which is the primary factor in determining your Page Rank. Next to the effective use of keywords in the page title, meta tags, page headings and content, PR is the most important factor that Google will use for determining your search engine ranking position.

Solid site keyword research, competition analysis, superior site content, along with a focused SEO campaign will help to ensure the success of your new website. Create your site with the user in mind. Create a positive. Memorable experience for your viewers and the rankings will follow.