Successful SEO in long term prospect is truly impossible without bringing all pages of your website in accordance with requirements of search engines. This is so called on page SEO. As you might know there's a whole bunch of advices for website owners that are helpful if you want to make your site well indexed.
Usually recommendations include URL, on page links, titles, keywords usage, Meta tags, etc. All SEO activities should start from optimizing website as only this way you pages will be fully recognized by search engines' robots.
Website URLs are one of the most significant factors. If you look through SEO based articles, you may find the opinions that the only way to get better rank is to purchase a domain that has your main keyword in its name. Let's say you want to make a website devoted to cell phone reviews. Your main keyword will be cell phone reviews, so in ideal situation you should get cellphonereviews.com domain. This is definitely right approach, but it's not the only possible way to promote your website, so don't be upset if all domain names with your keyword are already sold to others.
URL naming is more important for Google and it works less on Bing and Yahoo. In case your domain name is not as good as you wish it to be, there are several approaches that can help you. First create pages with keywords in URLs. This works fine for less important keywords. For example, yoursite.com/how-to-choose-cellphone.html isn't the worst idea. But what should one do with index page that still should contain your main keyword. There's one simple solution - sub-domain. Creating a sub-domain is a piece of cake and you can include all keywords you wish. In this case your link will look like cellphonereviews.yoursite.com and will be perfectly indexed.
By the way, apart from pages and sub-domains you can create folders with keywords. Folders are almost as efficient as sub-domains. The process of creating is simple - you make a folder on your server and put new pages into it. Your URL will look in the following way - yoursite.com/cellphonereviews.
So you've done with URLs and now it's time to think about page attributes. Check your load time. It shouldn't be too long. If you're not satisfied with it, limit number of images, scripts, external calls, CSS, etc per one page. As editing code usually requires programming skills, it would be better if you ask someone with coding knowledge and who's also aware of SEO to review your page.
After you have checked everything on your website and it's ready for indexing it's high time to start off page optimization. This aspect is focused on the way search engines see and rate you and tightly connected with backlinking (the way other websites link to you). Off page SEO is often referred to as link building. The core of any SEO success is in smart backlinking from proper web resources.
Each website promotion starts with preparations connected with inner optimization. Once your pages are ready, you have proper URLs and their structure, and other factors are taken into consideration, you get a strong foundation for your future success. Only after finishing on page optimization you can start off page actions and apply your strategy for building as many links to your website as you can. If everything is done right, you will see your website position improving.