SEO friendly website

I think if the below points are taken care off then a website or blog should rank well on search engines.

1. Install a good Website analytics – The first thing is to install a web analytics tool on the website in order to analyze the change in traffic and to understand viewers behavior on the website.

There are couple of free tools available in the market like Google Analytics & AWstats. Pretty much accurate.

2. Do a comprehensive Keyword Research – Draw a list of most relevant keywords around the subject of your website. Also use negative keywords. Google offer free tool for keyword selection. It is a good idea to find good keywords with both high & low competition. Google Adwords Keyword Tool

write your content containing these keywords.

3. Setup a Google Webmaster Tools account

• Submit and check a sitemap

• Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about how Googlebot accesses a particular site

• Generate and check a robots.txt file

• List internal and external pages that link to the site

• See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the click through rates of such listings

• View statistics about how Google indexes the site, and if it found any errors while doing it

• Set a preferred domain (e.g. prefer wikipedia.org over www.wikipedia.org or vice versa), which determines how the site url is displayed in SERPs

4. Use Header Tags - Use h1-h6 header tags.

(h1> defines the largest heading. h6> defines the smallest heading.

Headings Are Important

Use HTML headings for headings only. Don't use headings to make text BIG or bold.

Search engines use your headings to index the structure and content of your web pages. Since users may skim your pages by its headings, it is important to use headings to show the document structure. H1 headings should be used as main headings, followed by H2 headings, then less important H3 headings, and so on.)

5. Create unique content - use Google's new meta tag.

The web is full of duplicate content. Search engines try to index and display the original or “canonical” version. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking.

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.

6. CSS Validation - Your website should look the same on all browers.

CSS Validator 

7. Image & Hyper link Optimization – Hyperlink all important text within your site. Use alt text tag for images.

8. Meta Description & Keyword Tag Optimization -

This meta element defines a description of your page:

This meta element defines keywords for your page:

The intention of the name and content attributes is to describe the content of a page.

However, since too many webmasters have used meta tags for spamming, like repeating keywords to give pages a higher ranking, some search engines have stopped using them entirely.

9. Easy Navigation

10. Title Tag Optimization

A simple HTML document, with the minimum of required tags:

11. Directory Submissions - submit your site to various directories for back links! 

List of Site - http://free-webdirectory.com.au/resources/250dir.xls

12. Social Networking

Blogging and participating in others blog. Leave your blog address. Be a guest editor etc.

Create groups on Facebook, Linkendin. Open a twitter account for daily updates.

13. RSS Feeds – Use feedburner