1. Submit your site to the big 4: Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com are the leading search engines. Most of the other engines follow these leaders. Include your SITEMAP (sitemaps for search engines works best in XML format)

2. Get listed in open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as opendns.org and del.icio.us

3. Create rich content sites. Avoid multiple pages with duplicate content, sub-domains or sites with different domain names but same content.

4. Take advantage of free Google tools to track your visitors and see where they are going and when. Use this data to improve your site.

5. Use text in addition to images in your content, links and important subjects.

6. Make the site Title tags descriptive and simple using keywords. Avoid repeating keywords.

9. Keep the title tag to 60-80 characters maximum.

10. Limit meta tag description to 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. Optimize pages by using keywords in your site with headings.

12. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

13. Have fewer than 100 per page to avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.

14. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

15. Know who you are linking to – never join link schemes, avoid excessive reciprocal links and link exchange web rings.as you may unknowingly invite web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, porn or scam sites. Linking to them greatly affects your search engine rankings.

16. Relevant links are far more important than quantity. Quality links improve your site’s rankings in search. Consider links as votes for or against your site.

17. Do not use hidden links or invisible text. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors.

18. Make your site useful and informative so visitors have a reason to return.

19. Use caution when purchasing SEO services. Check references and research their histroy as some use illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.

20. Create websites that provide a useful service or product that is simple to use, informative to visit and fun to look at. Built it right and they will come!