When optimizing your website for the Search Engine Spiders, there are two types of factors involved:

On Page Factors and Off Page Factors

ON PAGE FACTORS:

Keywords/ Key Phrases

• Keyword in URL

• Keyword in Domain Name

• Keyword in Title Tag

• Keyword in Meta Tag

• Keyword in Body

• Keyword in H1, H2 and H3

• Keyword in alt text

Internal Links

• Efficient tree-like structure

• Links to Internal Pages

• Validate all internal links   http://www.dead-links.com/

• Internal links to keywords

Outgoing Links

• To External Pages

• To Keywords

• Outgoing Anchor Text

• Validate all external links   http://www.dead-links.com/

• Less than 100 links total

 

Other On Page Factors

• Domain name extension

• File size  (Try not to exceed 100K page size

• Hyphens in URL

OFF-PAGE FACTORS

Off-page criteria are obtained from sources other than the website.

• Links     If Content is King, then Links are Queen. Search engines look at links pointing to your site as verification that you are an important authority site. It’s not just the quantity of links but the quality that counts. 

  If you have good content, a lot of links will come your way naturally, but if you want to speed things up, you’ll need to actively pursue those links. One way is to contact theme related, non-competitive authority sites and request a link. The acid test for a potential link is if there is a natural, logical reason for that site to link to you. If not, then you don’t want the link.

  And, you want the links back to your site to use your keyword text in them. This is extremely important. If the keyword you are targeting is “widget” then you want the link back to your widget page to use that text and not “click here” or something like that.

  Another way to use your content to get back links is by submitting articles to other sites for publication (A blog and RSS feed are great for this). Just be sure the content includes links to your site.

  Submitting to trusted directories is also a good place to start. Most of the best require a fee for a listing, but they can be a great first step in your link building campaign.

  There’s no simple, easy one-step way to gain links. It’s really about networking and relationships and your useful content is the key.

   

• Competition    Keep track of your competition by searching for your primary keywords and study what they are doing. Don’t copy them, but you can analyze what they are doing right and you are doing wrong. See who is linking to them and investigate getting your own link. If you are a new site, you’ll be playing catch up for a while, but have faith. That guy in the #1 spot had to start from scratch at some point, too.

 

• Analysis & Statistics    Sounds boring, but all of your hard work is worthless if you don’t know how you are doing. Chances are your hosting company will have some sort of web statistics feature where you can check basics such as unique visitors, where your traffic is coming from (referrals), page not found errors, etc. One mistake newbies make is to consider “hits” as the number of visitors they are getting. In actuality, “hits” are useless information. Hits are simply server pulls. As an example, if you have ten images on a page each time the page is loaded each image results in a server pull or “hit.” What you really want to look at is the number of “unique visitors” to your site, not hits, as an indication of your traffic.

 

• History   There is evidence that the search engines actually look at your domain history in their ranking algorithms (How long the domain has been up, how many years you’ve renewed for, if you’ve changed IP addresses frequently, etc.). The more stable you are the more they consider you a trusted site.

For a detailed chart of on page and off page factors both positive and negative follow this link