Basically you will need to take care two main issues when you are doing the SEO works for your website. You will need to build some external links to your website and this is the off page SEO work. You will also need to do the on page SEO, which is about the contents and the website itself.
It is very important to make your website a themed website. It will be a lot easier for you to do the SEO work if you have a themed website. It will be quite difficult for you to do the on page SEO work if your site is just a general site. Of course it is not totally impossible to do on page SEO for a general site. However, it will normally a lot easier for you to do that if you site has a theme.
Of course you will also make the articles and contents related to your site. For example, if you site is about wedding, you may create articles on topic such as wedding rings or wedding invitations. You will not create an article related to debt consolidation in your wedding website.
The next step is to take care of the meta tags in each web pages. As all experts will tell you, you wil need to make sure that the title contains your main keywords. It is also important that each page will target at different keywords.
The next two meta tags you will need to consider are the keyword and description tags. In the past these two tags were extremely important. Of course they are less important nowadays since Google does not really take them as parameter for ranking. However, there is no point to neglect them since there are engines which still take them as parameters for ranking.
The next thing you will to do is to create a good interlinking between the web pages within your website. Normally, links from the home page to the internal pages will be indexed a lot faster by the search engines. Of course the hierarchy of the internal links should also be taken care of.
When we talk about links, you will need to consider both inbound and outbound links. You will try to build inbound links by starting link building campaign. On the other hand, you will also link to other sites. Remember, you should only link to sites which are related to yours.
In fact, it is not difficult to do the on page SEO work. However, you will need to spend some time to do it. Otherwise there is no way for you to fight for the first few positions in search engines.