A website you build might look really flashy and pack in a lot of features, but ask yourself an honest question here: What good are all those bells and whistles doing if nobody's even visiting your site? This is the problem you're going to have unless you address the issue of SEO, so bone up on your skills.
To know where you stand with your particular niche market, you should check on your page rank at least once a week. By checking your rank, you will find out varying information about how competitors are finding you and you will also realize what you need to do in order to shoot up in the rankings. Your goal should be a page rank of 1.
Include useful external links on your website. The number of outbound links can positively affect a website's search engine rank, however, make sure that the pages you link to are relevant and search engine optimized themselves. It is also best to link to related websites but not direct competitors, as you do not want to lose potential customers in a bid to increase your search engine rank.
Search engine optimize all assets found on your website. By carrying out SEO on spreadsheets (.xls), documents (.doc, .pdf), videos (.avi), audio (.mp3), presentations (.ppt) and images (.jpg, gif, .png) within your website, you can maximize the number of search queries that refer web searchers to your website and increase your website's traffic.
Generate many pages that focus on specific things individually, rather than putting a slew of content all on one page. Search engines may categorize your content as spam if they do not see a logical organization of your ideas and subjects, so bucketing subjects into different pages will make your site seem more legitimate to search engines.
Effective SEO tactics will not require a high level of skill or even a whole lot of effort. What's important is that you take the right approach. As you learn about SEO, you will find that a few minor tweaks can equate to big results. Get started on your optimization by using what you've learned here.