HI guys where is the best starting point for SEO?

The best point to start on is by going to Google and finding as many sites that are related to yours as possible. And try and get them to link to you. Link popularity is 99.9% of the game. It is best to get One-Way Links to your site but link exchanging will work to some degree.

Are you asking how to start learning about seo? Or what you should frst be doing on your site?

If it's the learning part just read as much as you can. There are plenty of good forums devoted to seo and most will have a section for the basics and often the non-forum part of the site will articles.

If it's the doing part then I'd suggest start by deciding what keywords you want to use on your site and making sure to use, but not overuse your keywords in the titles of your pages. Optimize each page of your site for 2-3 keywords.

You'll also want to make sure your site has been developed in an seo friendly way. Make sure you've provided text only navigation for the search engines to follow and add a sitemap to your site.

As Visio said backlinks are very important and it's probably never too early to start. However since the anchor text you use in backlinks (when you can contol it) can greatly impact your search engine rank it's a good idea to know what keywords to place there first.

Get a good domain
Put some content on it
Create a good navigation system to move between pages of content
Use some forum or directory software to create a sense of community or reason to return to your site
Ask other sites if they will link to you
Submit your site to directories
Talk about your site on forums

Like mr. William said, content is king. Publish lots of quality content.

One other thing. DON'T SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE OR ANY OTHER SEARCH ENGINE. If you want to kill your site that is the easiest way. Let Google find you by itself. It will give you better ranks.

Use Spell check. Make sure that you don't have spelling errors. If you really want your site to come up tops don't use any words that are underlined and not recognized by word.

I tend to make up words and use words in uncommon fassion so some of my articles have WC3 errors in them. I'm ok with because I advertise directly to human visitors. But for SEO purposes this is no no.

Make sure your pages are wc3 valid.

That will help you tremendously. I site with high PageRank, good link popularity, good keyword saturation, and high traffic rank but has error may not be ranked as highly as a site that has more valid HTML.

Originally Posted by Visio

One other thing. DON'T SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE OR ANY OTHER SEARCH ENGINE. If you want to kill your site that is the easiest way. Let Google find you by itself. It will give you better ranks.

No it won't.

Submitting is a futile exercise, Yes. But not submitting won't give you any better rankings!

A lot of good tips here thatnks guys. Can anyone tell me if i should put all my domains on different class C's ? or not bother.

Also which hosting company do you guys recomend?

Don't bother

Your choice in a web host just depends on your given needs and level of confidence in managing your account. Chances are you won't need all the features a typical web host offers, but there will probably be some you realize you absolutely do need.

Start by defining what your needs are so you know what kind of package you'll need. Most if not all hosts will let you upgrade your account later so you don't need to pay for a more expensive package that you think you'll want later at first.

You'll probably get better customer support with a smaller host as opposed to a larger compnay though that's not necessarily going to be true. A good way to test is simply call or email a potential web host and see how fast they get back to you and how well they answer your questions.

Price is obviously a factor, but sometimes it's worth spending an extra dollar or two a month for better support.

Space and bandwidth will probably be two of the biggest factors you want to consider. Chances are though you won't need nearly as much of either as typical web hosts offer. If you have a large site and get a lot of traffic to your site disk space and bandwidth will be more of a concern.

Also which hosting company do you guys recomend?

I host www.steelers12thman.com through Steve's company:
YellowHouseHosting

I like it. I used Yahoo's web hosting first and find the cpanel that Steve offers to be far more useful. I currently have his Value Hosting package, but plan to use his database hosting for a different domain later.

I don't think you'll be disapointed.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

No it won't.

Submitting is a futile exercise, Yes. But not submitting won't give you any better rankings!

Yeah it does. I have seen it happen.

and exactly how can you demonstrate it as a proven fact.

I agree with Chris on this. Submitting to search engines isn't going to do anything, but it's not going to hurt you either.

The search engines basically ignore the submissions since so much of what they get is spam. It doesn't mean you're going to be penalized for submitting in any way. That would kind of be the equivalent of entrapment by the search engines.

"Hey submit your site to us, but we're going to rank your site lower if you do"

That's just not going to happen. The sites you've seen that got better rankings probably did for other reasons and not submitting was a coincidence.

There's no reason to submit your site to a search engine. Just get a couple of backlinks and the search engines will find your site. However if you feel you have to submit go ahead. You'll waste a few minutes of your time, but that's all.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

and exactly how can you demonstrate it as a proven fact.

Because I have talked with one the people at Google who works in that department. Actually he gave me lots of useful information that he probably wasn't supposed to. He said that if google finds you by itself it makes a note if you will and that is your first back link. However if you submit it doesn't have to find you and it puts your site on a list if you will that in a couple months you may get listed on Google somewhere. However without submitting you get listed faster and get better rankings because google is finding you by itself.
This is what he said just in other words. Probably better english :P
And since he said that I have tested it on about 7 sites and it seems to be 100% accurate.

IMO the best starting point is to read articles, lurk on forums like this. Start with on page optimization.

There's no reason to submit your site to a search engine. Just get a couple of backlinks and the search engines will find your site. However if you feel you have to submit go ahead. You'll waste a few minutes of your time, but that's all.

I have seen this to be true. In fact I've always been told (and I've seen/read) that MSN and Yahoo index the quickest followed by Goo. On my most recent site I had some b/l by some high-traffic sites and got indexed within a day (or less) and have achieved top ranking for some strange but apparently worthwhile search phrases.

I've heard that NOT submitting can lead to quicker indexing, but I doubt there's any truth to that.