I am about to start SEO and i wondered what you would put as the first 5 steps of SEO.

1) Understand that 99.9% of SEO advice is complete, utter, and total crap.

2) Don't get caught up in link exchanges, pyramid schemes, and other silly pet tricks.

3) Build for your users, and organic SEO will stem from that.

4) Understand that SEO and web design are tightly related, contrary to common opinion.

5) Don't listen to anything that comes from the TV Addicts/DVD Addicts "people", especially the parts about "build your links and improve your PR". PageRank is not a magic SEO bullet, contrary to published opinion.

PR i understand to be rubbish as i am PR4 after 2 months!

Some of the first steps involved are to figure out what your best content is, what your target market is, and who's on the fringes of that; people you can reach who would be interested in your site, but don't know about it now.

Originally Posted by davidshaw

PR i understand to be rubbish as i am PR4 after 2 months!

Then you're already in the 100th percentile as far as SEOs are concerned, mi hermano!

I get a PR3 sites within a week!

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Then you're already in the 100th percentile as far as SEOs are concerned, mi hermano!

simple join more forums, and visit here more oftenly.
there is few thousands visitor drop by here to listen to what you have to say

I am regularly on these forums now, as i have learned alot from being on here, hopefully with my new gained experience, i can help others like me that struggled at the start!

I would say that content is the biggest part. Make sure your content is good stuff and the rest will come.

1.) How to select keywords that you can easily rank for, and will convert traffic, not just eat bandwidth.

2.) How to organize your keywords throughout your site, so you can get the most bang for your buck.

3.) That there are two types of links out there that can help you rank in the search engines. Crappy but optimized links like the ones in my signature, and links that build authority like the ones you get from blogs and other online publications

4.) Realizing that you need to go out and get both types of links. Just having content isn't going to get them for you

5.) That it doesn't matter where quality links point to on your domain. All of your keywords will benefit from more quality domain links.

1) Understand that 99.9% of SEO advice is complete, utter, and total crap.

2) Don't get caught up in link exchanges, pyramid schemes, and other silly pet tricks.

3) Build for your users, and organic SEO will stem from that.

4) Understand that SEO and web design are tightly related, contrary to common opinion.

5) Don't listen to anything that comes from the TV Addicts/DVD Addicts "people", especially the parts about "build your links and improve your PR". PageRank is not a magic SEO bullet, contrary to published opinion.

Couldn't agree more

Just wondering why you have "Looking for Backlinks?" on your signature though

As far as the original question goes re. good SEO, the "O" depends largely on the "S" involved. A blog will have different techniques than a corporate site; a video site will have different tricks than a forum. Consider what users you want coming to your site, consider what users you want linking to your site -- links from the wrong (i.e. irrevelant) site can do more harm than good.

I agree 100% that PR is a pretty lousy determinant of search engine ranking. If you write content and engineer site design that will engage your users, your ranking will increase. Avoid nonsense like search engine directories; they're run by scam artists who are laughing all the way to the AdSense bank. Just think content, architecture, content, design, content, graphic, content, content, content.

But, as I said, make sure you differentiate between what type of site you are creating, what webmasters you want linking to you and what surfers you want frequenting your site.

Click the link and you'll find out, SearchAnyway. It's probably not what you think, though.

As it was mentioned here and all aroud forums there is no way for two people to come with the same top five tactics that can be used to ensure your site is successfully cralled,indexed and positioned on the major search engines.

Some questions to be asked :

1) Are there keywords that you are targeting relevant to your site content ?

2) Is your body copy keyword rich?

3) What is the value of your inbound/outbound links ?
High quality inbound links will help you immensely to rank higher. You need to in be kind of "collectioner" here.

4) Does your site have a flat structure? Not only a user will be thankful but a crawler will not face "hard to digest" areas - as a result your site will be ranked higher.

5)Is your content updated on the regular basis?
If it is a corporate site consider adding a blog and/or forum to help ranking

Originally Posted by Tatan

5)Is your content updated on the regular basis?
If it is a corporate site consider adding a blog and/or forum to help ranking

I'd like to see proof that regular content updates lead to higher rankings before I swallow that one. Regular updates might lead to more frequent spidering but that doesn't mean better rankings (contrary to what a lot of people think).

Actual changing of the content won't increase your ranking, unless the new content is more optimized than the old.

That's quite right, sites that frequently update their content tend to be spidered more often, especially large sites. Think about your content as a relationship between what People type to search you and what you offer. That will give you a good idea to write some optimized content.

Frequently updating content won't get you ranking for highly searched phrases, but it will get you more traffic from 'in the tail' searches.

However, you'll only come up for 'in the tail' searches if you have an authority domain. And the only way to get an authority domain is to link build.

Link building is key.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

Some of the first steps involved are to figure out what your best content is, what your target market is, and who's on the fringes of that; people you can reach who would be interested in your site, but don't know about it now.

Nail on the head.

Which sites appeal to your audience? Are their forums, blogs, info sites that compliment your theme? Get into the community where your site visitors are and start making contacts. Think of it as the difference between selling heaters or air conditioners in Alaska...go where your market is and sell the product they want (which is, hopefully, your passion to build).