1. Start with keyword research

You have heard it a million times before; keywords, keywords and keywords. The fact of the matter is that the search engines index everything using keywords or phrases. That is why you should be using the right keywords, so that people are able to find you. The biggest mistake I find that website owners make is not spending enough time or effort in keywords research. Instead, they choose some kind of funky names for their domain and titles for their articles and then wonder why no one can find them.

Proper keyword research will not only give you great ideas on what niche to focus on but also gives you a realistic forecast of your chance to dominate that niche.

2. Choose a domain that has your keyword(s) in it

This is one intelligent thing that you could do to stay ahead in the search race. Your URL with the relevant keyword will carry quite a bit of priority in the searches. Also, buy a domain using.com extension and if you are serious, which you have got to be, buy the domain for 2+years. There are a lot of fraudsters who buy domains that only last one year and you should make sure that you do not get regarded in the same light as them. A great way to buy a domain is look for an expired one that has a good history.

3. Create your website using Blog or CMS software

Over 150,000 WordPress Blogs are created every day. They are trusted by millions of people, more so than company websites. Google loves blogs because of their relevant and frequently updated content. Setting up a blog is easy, I prefer Wordpress or Joomla as CMS system. I would not go for a traditional website nowadays.

4. Establish quality inbound and outbound links

Google ranks your site based on the amount of inbound links it has from other sites. But the key is that the inbound links need to be from quality sites (those with a high Page Rank). I would say, stay away from the paid services that create hundreds of inbound links for you. The majority of the time these inbound links are from low quality sites that will add no value to your site. Spend time and get authoritative sites (Page Rank 4 and above) linking back to you, because inbound links from these types of sites are worth their weight in gold. You can do this by producing good quality articles and videos and distributing them out to various sites.

5. Put relevant keywords in content of your website

In order of importance; focus on page titles, headlines, image tags, and meta descriptions. These should always contain the target keywords. You can also position the keywords earlier in the article, and make them bold or underline them. But forget keyword density and stuffing your pages with as many keywords as possible, that doesn't work anymore!

6. Use your chosen keywords as anchor text when linking

Anchor text (a hyper link on a word or phrase that is click-able) has a positive weighting in search engine algorithms. Use Anchor text keywords when you can, especially when linking to internal pages.

7. Install Web Analytics software

Unless you measure, you never know if you are doing well or not so well, right? Install an efficient tracking software like Google Analytics and using Google's Webmaster Tools and keep track of how your website is performing.

8 ) Utilize XML Sitemaps readable for all the major search engines

Sitemaps are easy to create and are basically a list of all the pages that belong to your website. Once you create a sitemap, it is easy for Google to crawl your site and index all the URLs on your website. What is the point of creating content if the search engines can't find it?

9. Regularly create and publish relevant content that has value

Write quality content and publish it daily for the first 30 days, thereafter at least once or twice a week. I favour blogs because they are more personal and the nature of blogs encourage you to publish more frequently. Frequently updated content is seen as more reliable than static sites. Creating more content on your site will increases the chance that more pages are indexed; this leads to greater visibility and increased traffic flow to your site.

10. Bookmark your sites and get your friends to bookmark your site using social media

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all get favorably indexed, and generally rank on the top of the search results. I recommend using Digg, Youtube, or one of the many bookmarking services.

11. Insert your website on to relevant and high ranking business directories.

I generally avoid paid directories. It is much worth it to be on the top of Google Maps by getting your website listed on relevant and local directories.