An obvious first choice but still probably the most important element of a websites content. To the uninitiated a website isn't categorized by its graphical content but its words. It's therefore vitally important to make sure your website not only looks good visually but has enough content stuffed away in the outer margins to keep the search engines happy. An important point to make here is to not stuff too many keywords in arbitrarily as Google being the swine that he or she is will soon be pulling your pants down for that schoolboy trick.
Quality Incoming Links
Google devised the process of ranking a website by the amount of other websites linking to it and supposedly therefore being the most popular and useful for those search terms. However the search engines are now moving away from this method of ranking now that every Tom, Dick and Harry is swapping links with one another. It's still a good idea to get as many incoming links as possible but don't bother with reciprocal link schemes as its a waste of everyones time
Meta Tags
These are the bits of code that form part of the description of what it is exactly your website does or services you offer or sell. Again, these, in the internet infancy, were all you needed to worry about. Simply type a few suggestive words in your description and keyword meta tags and see your website rise above the filthy competitors. Nowadays a bit more effort needs to be done to keep your website high among the rankings though its still necessary to use these meta tags
Useful content
The smart money for the foreseeable future among hardened SEO's is to make your website useful. Provide some quality tutorials like this fine specimen or better still offer free downloads or something that people will find indispensable.
Try to keep abreast of what is going on in the world of technology and weep with despair Podcasts are all the rage at the moment or at least they were until yesterday lunchtime, now they're probably met with incredulous derision among the cognoscenti. Other things to try and understand are RSS feeds - your guess is as good as mine, Blogs - which seem to be like sad online diaries as far as I can make out and user powered content sites whereby geeks worldwide sit at their consoles and vote on things that interest them which pretty much rules out anything I can comprehend. Be sure to implement all this somehow and you'll see your website sitting pretty on that ever encroaching monster - Google.
