There are two pieces that need to work together in order for a completely Optimized website. The first is On Page SEO and the second is Off Page SEO. On Page SEO is composed of Keyword Research, Competitor Research, Meta Tag Creation which consists of your Title Page, Description and Keywords, Coding such as Google Analytics for tracking your hits to your website, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Webmaster Tools, SEO Content Creation and Site Maps usually in XML or HTML format.
Keyword Research is very important in your SEO campaign and it is critical to chose the correct keywords to get the Optimal amount of hits to your website. One good tool to use is Wordtracker. The other way to go is to look at your competitors and see what keywords they are using and match them.
Meta Tags are also important but not as important as they used to be. This consists of your Meta Title, Meta Description and your Meta Keywords. Your Meta Title should consist of about 80 characters and include your keywords and the areas of town you service. The Meta Description should consist of about 155 characters and should include descriptive words about what you do and where you service. Lastly, the Meta Keywords which are least important should consist of no more than 180 characters.
Google Analytics is a good and easy way to track your statistics to your website. All you have to do is set up a Google Account and go to Google Analytics and set up an account and paste the code they give you to your website. This will track all traffic to your website and give you statistics on that information.
Google Webmaster Tools is a very good tool to have. This tool provides you with all other information about your website such as crawl errors, keyword ranking (New) and many other statistics as well as where you can input your site map.
SEO Content Creation is a vital part of On Page SEO. This is important because this is the area that Google goes to verify the keywords on your website. Creating good content is vital to good rankings. You want content that writes about what you do, relevant keywords and locations you serve. You want to make sure that the keywords you are optimizing for are located in the content.
Off Page SEO is the process of getting other websites to link to yours. This can be by way of link building, press releases, RSS feeds, Article Submission. Social Media on a new way of doing this by creating pages that link to yours. By some reports this is about 80{cfd7c793d19a2cab240b09444b7dd5373caec30c78a7d1b98290351b88e154ae} of what Google looks at when determining where you will show up on the Search Engines.
In result, SEO is a great investment for any business especially small and start up businesses. It is the fastest way to reach a large amount of customers in a short period of time. It is far less then other online advertising methods or Phone books which no one looks at anymore.