Simply stated, On Page Characteristics are anything you can effect within the construction of a single page. This includes everything that is placed in the headers, body, and on-page links (both internal and external). Special attention should be given to: Title, meta description, H1, H2...H6, <b>, <i>. Keyword proximity, keyword density and relevance...more on this later.

Off Page Characteristics refer to all links (both from pages contained within your own website and from pages of other websites) that point to your specific page(s). The term "pagerank" is specifically designated to evaluate and weight "off page" criteria. Special attention should be given to: anchor text, Reference_tags, "title" attribute and "target_"... more on this later.

You need lots of content, LOTS of it. Before you have even considered site design and such, you should have 100 odd pages of actual content. Yes, there are supposed to be two zero’s on the end of that 1… 100, I mean it. A page of content means about 200-500 words.

Of course, no-one does this, I didn’t! But, if you are serious of getting gobs of traffic, and you do have lots of rich content to publish, just think how far ahead you will be of poor schmuks like me.

Manual keyword research is usually the least effective of the two methods, but it is free and doesn’t require much in the way of specialist knowledge. It does mean that you need to know how potential visitors to your site think, and more importantly how they will search. Start with the main topic of your site and think about the terms your visitors would enter when using a search engine. The topic itself is also unlikely to give you the best results. In the case of this website, the topic is SEO. A quick search on Google shows that there are 176,000,000 results for this term alone. Reaching the top of this list will be almost impossible.

Before building a website that showcases your products or service you must first identify who it is that will be purchasing said products and services. Not all traffic is good traffic. Many webmasters target the "high traffic terms" that have little relevance to their market instead of the "targeted terms" that have the highest conversion. Target all your relevant terms ("highest traffic first") and don't go for so called "hot terms" that will eat up their bandwidth and produce no sales