The most important thing to remember when you research SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is that it’s not a treatment but rather a systematic approach inherent in your design process, so there are certain aspects of your site you can remedy and others you can’t unless you go back to the drawing board or plan on redesigning your site.
As you’re probably aware Google is the biggest player in the search business so their rules have dominated the SEO industry for years, and their algorithms look mostly at relevant content and backlinks more than anything, this is good news for web users because it makes searching easier and provides them with more meaningful results. The keywords you are targeting should be competitive (not too generic) and relevant to the content of your site. Those keywords should typically be present in the Domain Name, Headers, Text, Page Titles, Alt Tags, Meta Tags and finally in the actual file names (i.e. jpg files, gif files, html files etc.). This last one throws some people off, especially web designers because it’s very time consuming. HTML files and image files should be saved with meaningful file names that contain at least one of your targeted keywords.
As you can see this is all pre-design, especially something like the domain name, which is why it is crucial to start with a concept first, then select your keywords very carefully because they are difficult to change. Here's something to think about, the keywords you want to go after are the ones your clients are searching for (not necessarily the same as how you see yourself) then register your domain name and build your website. An example of this is the keyword "affordable" which is a common search keyword, although you may not necessarily market your product as such, make sure you are aware of what your customers are searching for or the traffic will go elsewhere.
Once the site is up and running there is no need to submit it to ANY search engine, this will only result in more spam for you. Google will index your pages automatically within weeks as long as you have one or more back-links, which are basically links on other sites that point to your domain. This is one of the most powerful post-design SEO strategies ever and is the main component behind Google’s success. Back-linking (and content relevance) is what increases your PageRank and drives your rank up in Google’s results page. Spend as much time as you can getting other website owners to link to your site, a valuable back-link is one that comes from a similar type of site (with similar relevant content) that is itself indexed by Google and that does not contain link to too many other sites. Ideally the hyperlink itself (the text) should also contain your target keywords.
Google search algorithms are a closely guarded trade secret as you can imagine, there are a few people who claim to know exactly how they work, but most web designers will tell you that they do penalize sites for certain things considered to be deceptive. For example don’t hide text (text color same as background color) and don’t exchange links with unknown websites that have no real content.
I’m sure that once you’ve read this you’ll be out researching everything I said and you’ll find tons of articles with more detail, the top thing for you now is to
- Create relevant content like articles etc. and useful information as opposed to links
- Build relationships and exchange links with other websites in your industry
