1. Reserch your keywords:
You want to be ranked high by search engines. But for what search terms? If you are selling vacation in Timbaktu will users who are looking for real estate in Timbaktu be of any use? You dont want just traffic, you want targeted traffic. Choose your keywords wisely. Let is be relevant to your product, your niche.

Choose keywords which are moderately competitive. There might be a lot of visitors looking for real estate, but can you compete with all the big shot companies who are also trying for the same keyword. But if you try a very specific keyword, there might not be any visitors from that keyword.

2. Create useful content:
When visitors come to your site, they are looking for something. They want some information or maybe some jewelry. If you donot have compelling content on your site, will your visitors bother staying? Before visitors and search engines love you, you need to have great content on your site.

3. Optimize your website:
How do search engine know what terms to rank you for? They will analyse your site to determine that. If your webpage has title as vacation in timbactu, and that term occurs a number of times, there is a overwhelming probability that this page is about vacation in Timbactu. So to optimize your webpage, keep your keywords in the title as well as at some places in the webpage.

However do not sacrifice readability to optimize your site. Your visitors come first, search engines are secondary.

4. Get links
Search engines use the number and quality of links to determine how good or popular your site is. If millions of pages link to your site, it is guaranteed to be good.

Getting links is probably the most difficult part as this is not under your control. To get links
1. Submit to relevant directories like DMOZ, Zeal. They take free submissions, but will add only high quality sites. That is why it is important to have great content before trying to get links.
2. Have great content people will willingly link to. If your site offers some information or tools not available anywhere else, people will willingly link to it.
3. Reciprocal linking, that is you linking to some site which links back to you, is dead. But if there is a site which is relevant to yours by all means link to it and ask for a link back.
4. Links from related fields count much more than a non related link. 5. Choose your anchor words. If many people link to you with a specific keyword, then your relevancy for that search term increases.

5. Wait
There is no magic pill for overnight SEO success. Even if you do everything right, it takes time before your site ranks high. Have patience. Keep creating great content. Keep getting links. And soon you will see your ranks skyrocket. Step by step SEO