1. Determine your goals for your website. How will you drive traffic to your website? Plan for this up front, while developing your website. If search engines are important to you, then proceed to step 2.
2. Allocate a budget to online marketing and search engines. Its as important as what you spend for designing and hosting your website. The budget you set will instruct these further steps you should take:
3. Optimize your website during design to perform well in search engines. Make sure it contains the correct density of keywords important in searches.
4. Make a commitment to keep your content fresh. Augment content as frequently as practicable, because search engines reward rich content.
5. Devote resources (your time or the money to hire others) to actively work on search engine placement. Monitor your ranking weekly or monthly in the major search engines for key search terms; this can be done manually or you can utilize automated software to produce a monthly or weekly ranking report. Even if you plan to focus on free “organic” rankings, plan to set up Pay-Per-Click accounts at Google and Yahoo. All companies that want traffic...