Keyword research – This is the first and the most important part of your entire search marketing campaign. Before you start marketing, identify your market and keyword. For starting off, it is always advised to target low competitive keywords. This will not only get you your coveted ranking easily but will also help you to avoid the Google sandbox. I use Overture Keyword Research Tool, Word Tracker and Google trends for analyzing and selecting keywords.

Title – After you’ve decided your target keyword, the very next thing to do is to frame your homepage title. The page title is one of the most important elements of on-page optimization. A title not only is crucial to ranking well but also for your CTR (click through rate) A well crafted keyword rich title will help you in achieving better ranking as well as bring in more visitors. The title is the first thing that your potential visitors will see about your site in the SERP and make a decision on whether to click on your link or not.

Make sure that the length of your title does not exceed 65 characters. Keep the first 30 characters for search engines and the later 30 for your visitors. It is always advised that you keep your targeted keywords at the beginning of your title. Keep unique titles for each and every page and restrain yourself from repeating a keyword within the title. If you have to repeat keywords, make sure that it does not get repeated more than twice.

SEO experts advise using a one-word buffer word before your main keyword in the title. For example, if your targeted keyword is Myspace Widgets, start you title with “Free Myspace Widgets” or “Get Myspace Widgets” etc. This buffer-word is used to prevent the raising of over-optimization flags, which Google looks out for nowadays. Though there is no solid fact to prove this but is advised.

Description – Meta description is a short piece of text describing your page. Make sure that your page description doesn’t exceed 100 – 125 characters. Keep your targeted keywords at the first line of the description and keep it in a sentence without any punctuation. Though many believe that search engines now ignore the meta description, it is still advised to keep it as it provides additional text to your page and is very useful while optimizing image-based pages.

Keywords – This is another area which many SEO experts believe to be ignored by all the major search engines. Though I also believe in that, still I would suggest you keep your keyword tag just to complete the basic on page optimization checklist. Don’t stuff too many keywords within the tag and keep it within 200 characters.

Headers – Headers are also a very important on-page optimization factor that can influence your ranking in the SERP. Search engines weigh keywords heavily that are within the header tags. Again, many SEO gurus advise to start your header with H2 instead of the conventional H1. This is again to be safe from the clutches of over-optimization. There are many reputed search professionals who have claimed that using H1 resulted in a dip in their search engine rankings and hence suggest starting the header hierarchy with H2. Again don’t stuff too many keywords within the header tags. Make it look natural and meaningful.

Body Content – Search engine spiders read pages from top left to bottom right. So it is always a good idea to place keywords on the start of your page content as well as near the end of it. Sprinkle your keywords sensibly within your content and don’t go by the false idea that more the number of keywords, greater the chance of ranking higher. Search engines don’t rank that way. Try to maintain a keyword density of 3 – 5% and plug in your keywords in such a way so that the matter looks natural, is grammatically correct and definitely not look spammy.

Links – This is one of the most important factors of ranking well in the SERP. Backlinks from related and high PR sites are crucial for ranking well specially in Google. Top most priority is given to one-way links from related authority sites. Go for related directories and the ones to target primarily are Dmoz and Yahoo. Link exchange is also a good way of getting backlinks. Another way of attracting a large amount of one-way links is a link bait. A link bait is basically content that would compel other webmasters to voluntarily link to your site from their’s as a way to provide useful and interesting content to their visitors. There are many ways to create a link bait. You may go through the web and will find tons of ideas for creating a sharp link bait that will attract one-way links like a magnet.

Well these points pretty much sums up the basics of search engine optimization. Remember that SEO is not a overnite job and requires a lot of knowledge, hard work, perseverance and most importantly patience.