How To Optimize Your Website For Search Engines

In order to optimize your website, you need to ask yourself three questions:
1. How are people searching for my products and/or services?
2. Which sites are winning for those searches and why?
3. Which searches can I “win”? (This question shouldn’t be hard for nichepreneurs.)
From here, identify some search phrases for your website that are potentially winnable. Comb through your page and look for keywords that already coincide with the keyword phrases you’ve come up with. It’s advisable to dedicate one page of focused, well-written, and useful content for each keyword family you choose. (A good example is a page from an encyclopedia.)
Every page on your site must have a unique HTML title tag, meta keywords tag, and meta description tag. From here, follow W3C recommendations for HTML document structure. Begin the body copy of your page with your keyword phrase, and repeat it as needed as the theme of the page throughout your copy. Feature your keyword phrase prominently by including it in headers and making it bold or italics. Next, use text navigation on your site, and use the keyword phrases you have selected as the links. If you cannot use text navigation, include a footer on every page using text links. It’s ideal to build a text site map and link to it from every page of your site, as well as organizing navigation according to the importance of your keyword phrases.
If your site has several pages, link to the most important pages from every page of your site, and link to the other pages from section header pages and the site map. The last step will be to establish your site by submitting to the major directories, The Open Directory and the Yahoo! Directory, then build your link popularity by submitting to web directories, search engines, and requesting links from related websites.
-taken from http://www.youngentrepreneur.com