Firstly, make sure you are using Meta tags:
http://searchenginewatch.com/2167931Also, make an xml site map, link to it at the bottom of your webpage and submit it to google. This alone wont get you up on google, you also need good content. Make sure your website content is focused on what you are trying to get across, don't dribble or wonder into other topics, stay on topic and use lots of key words.
Once your website is set up with meta tags, sitemap, good content and submited to google you should work on backlinks. Backlinks improve google page rank which will reflect how high you rank in searches. Backlinks are basicly imbound links from other websites pointing at yours. The more the better, however 1 quality link is better than 100 poor links. To get a good quality link you need a backlink from a website that has a decent existing page rank: 2,3,4 would be reasonable for a new starting website. It is very unlikely such a website would give you a free backlink nor would they exchange reciprical links as a backlink from you is worthless to them. Instead you should buy links on website, stay away from banner links - they are expensive and serve little purpose at this stage of the game... we are still building the site, not looking to throw traffic at it... better traffic comes over time, you will see an established base of users return to your website if you slowly build backlinks rather than telling everyone to visit your website because SEO will attract people who actualy want to be there, these people will come back. You telling people, or advertising will generate traffic that doesn't realy want to be there, in which case they wont come back and your time and money will have been wasted. Another great way of bulding backlinks is to submit articles to article directories with links to your website in it. I suggest
http://www.yummyarticles.com for no bias reasons. :p
Ok, so now you're set, you've done all of the above. Sit back and watch the traffic roll in? No! You must constantly be building your backlinks, as i said the more the better! Submit your website to directories, ask friends to link to your website, put your link in your forum signature, sign up to affiliate networking websites such as
http://www.link-vault.com or
http://www.tnx.com (get invitation code here:
http://www.devppl.com/tnx-invitation-code/).
Ok, now your website is set up, and you know what you've got to do... build backlinks? Yes, and No! Another important part of getting traffic to your website and being well indexed by google is content, more specificaly the quality and regularity of content. I spoke earlier about quality so I wont repeat myself, instead I'll talk about regularity. You must update your content on a regular basis, lets take blogs for example. Blogs are very popular right now, simply because they generate a hell of a lot of traffic very quickly, all by a simple rule - posting regualy. If you post new, fresh, intuative and interesting content every couple of days this will greatly enhance your search ranking and traffic ranking. Make sure posts are relevent to the main content of the website.
For good SEO you should also take into consideration the simplist of things. File names being one of them. Ensure each file name corresponds exactly to what the file is, if it is an image you should describe the image in its name. Example, call a picture of a cat 'cutecat.jpg' rather than 'image1.jpg', same goes for all file types other than the obvius such as index and css etc... Alt tags on images are a must, describe images! Get images indexed in google images, this is another way to get more traffic.
A few links to finish with:
If you haven't already, make a google account - I advise you use google analytics to monitor traffic and google adsence to generate a bit of money when the traffic rolls in.
https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?c ... ox-a&hl=enDN Scoop is a fantastic tool to give you some info on your, or other peoples domains such as traffic rank, backlinks, age etc... don't trust the valuations however.
http://www.dnscoop.com/Alexa is the major website ranking company... check traffic rank and other stats here if you get ranked high enough.
http://www.alexa.comTNX is a good site for selling links on your website. There's a review on DEVPPL if you poke around.
http://www.tnx.net/?p=119626138Use Link-vault to 'swap' links with other people, good for backlink building.
http://www.link-vault.com/?ss=23243YummyArticles is a great site to submit articles to, articles are a great way to build content relevent backlinks!
http://www.yummyarticles.comHave fun, and don't give up!
(Yes I just wrote this here and now! LOL)