The following tips are not necessarily in order of importance, but are in the order you should consider when building a new website from scratch. My top 10 tips ranked by order of importance for high rankings are displayed elsewhere.

1. Know your geographic market and ensure your domain has the correct TLD.
If your primary market is the UK it is important to use a .UK TLD and ideally have your domain hosted on UK based servers.
2. Include keyword in Domain name (using hyphens if necessary).
This doesn’t mean having a domain name like keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com try to stick to the one hyphen and not read as spammy. A good example is a site that sells wheelchair ramps with the URL of the site being www.wheelchair-ramps.co.uk
3. Create as much content about your products or subject as you can.
After doing this divide in to 4 or 5 sections (this will help later when creating your navigation structure)
4. AFTER you have your site content start keyword researching
There are tools you can use for keyword research; Wordtracker and The Google AdWords Keyword Tool to name but two. I personally use a combination of the Google Keyword Tool, Google LSI and T.J. Common Sense.
5. Decide on 4 or 5 primary keywords to use as main sub-sections
Ideally have an idea of 4 or 5 main keywords, call them your Primary Keywords and then try to position secondary keywords with the Primary Word most closely associated with it.
6. Sit down and sketch out your navigation system
Put a lot of time in to this and play around until it is right, use Primary Keyword as headers for 5 main Sub-sections and use secondary keywords as headers for content pages under each Primary Keyword (more…)