Hi Guys, I run an e-commerce site so SEO is something I do every day. Here are a few pointers.
1. Try to include keywords in your page urls.
2. Forget about the meta keywords tag. Google and most search engines ignore it these days.
3. The meta title is important so make sure you include your keywords there
4. The meta description is important and should be a short snippet of what your page is about. Include important keywords.
5. Make good use of <h1> <h2> <h3> tags. Google loves these.
6. Write good content that will make sense to the person viewing your site, but ensure your important keywords are included.
7. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER hide text by making the colour the same as the background. This is black hat and won't help.
8. Remember the Google bot can not read Flash or Javascript.
9. Use good linking techniques and make sure that all your pages are linked to each other, so that google can crawl all around your site.
10. If you must have external links on your site use the rel="NOFOLLOW" to ensure the google bot does not follow them.
11. Sign up for article sites and write interesting articles relating to your site/product/hobby/photography etc. with links back to your site using good anchor text.
12. WAIT. Google does things in it's own time. You will NOT tame the beast.
When writing your titles, meta description and content beware that you don't keyword spam. To much repetition of your keywords will get you push way down the ranks.
Use this tool
LINKY to check your keyword density. The consensus is that your keyword should not appear any more that around 6% otherwise google feels that this will not read well and considers it spamming.
Setup Google Webmaster Tools.
if you website does not automatically generate a XML sitemap file then use a free tool to create one. Then in Google Webmaster tools give google the url to this sitemap (This must be XML format and not HTML). This should include all the links to every page on your site and will help google find pages on your site.