The best steps to take to creating an effectively optimized site is outlined by Google under their Webmaster Guidelines. Anyone who has a basic understanding of html or who wants to give their webmaster important information for the site’s setup should start here. Here’s a gloss over the most important points.

Visible Text = Content

When an SEOer tells you that your site needs more content, they mean visible text and more pages. Images, Flash, and Javascript are not readable by search engines. Images can be given alt tags, but these are given less weight because it is not always visible to the user. Common sense: visible characteristics (that are readable by search engines) are given greater weight in ranking algorithms because they are less vulnerable to spam.

Title Tags, Headings, and Text

Write title tags (looks like < title >Title Here< /title > and goes between the head tags), headings (looks like < h1 >Heading One Here< /h1 > and goes between the body tags), and body text with keyphrases. Don’t overuse keyphrases so it looks like you’re stuffing the page to increase your rankings at the expense of the user’s experience. Focus on one or two phrases for each page and include geographical terms if it is relevant. You’ll notice Google doesn’t even mention meta tags in their webmaster guidelines. These are sometimes used as the site’s description in the search engine results pages, but the chances are if Google doesn’t mention them in their guidelines, they probably aren’t extremely important.

Get Links

Tell people about your site, and get in-coming links with keyphrases in the linking text. It’s extremely important to have high-quality, relevant links to your site. Start by submitting to free directories like Dmoz. This will get your site indexed. Submit your site to Google if you want, but it’s not important to do this. Google should naturally index your site.

Wait

There is strong evidence that Google employs an aging delay. Don’t expect to be ranked well for most terms until at least six months have passed (and maybe longer). Continue to create content and get links.