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While there is a lot that goes into marketing a website - nothing is as important as search engines. Search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo and others) bring a large group of visitors who may or may not know about you or your company. As a designer / developer of web site for mote that 12 years I have learned a great deal about how content is crawled and indexed by search engines.
First things - first; Content is king! It is a daunting task to write about oneself... but it must be done. Luckily there are content developers out there. At Fine Line we have a process in place where our content developer (Shawn - an awesome in-house content writer) interviews the client and develops appropriate content SEFood (Search Engine Food). Once the content has been written and approved by the client we take a look at Analytics and trends of certain keywords that are determined by the client and by Fine Line Websites.
Once you have the content you then have to decide what category/keywords the site should come up under. I tend to focus on Google more than any other search engine because of it popularity and the number of tools Google offers to developers.
Tools I use to track keywords and determine trends for organic ranking (they all require accounts):
Hours of research go into this step and lots of trial and error. Sometimes - what you think you want isn't what you really need. When we take on SEO we watch it for months to see what works and what doesn't, then we analyze why. Organic ranking takes time and patience. I should say getting it right does anyway...
To get there faster; Sometime higher ranking on a particular word or phrase can be achieved by paying your way to the top. Meaning that paying for things like Google Adwords will not only get your ads seen by search engine visitors, it will also benefit your organic ranking simply because of the number of impressions.
So you have a list of keywords and your content has been well written with search engines and visitors in mind... Now what? Well, here is the magic part... Search engines read more than just the content of your pages - there are a number of meta tags and other element that have some weight. Title and Alt tags or the most abundant. These "tags" are html code that assist your browser in displaying information on a particular element. An "alt" tag is used to display alternative information for an image while a "title" tag is used to display extra information about an element. These tags are very important and can contain more targeted information than simply outputting a filename.
For Example:
<img scr="images/logo.jpg" alt="logo">
should be more like
<img scr="images/logo.jpg" alt="tbbjr graFX - CSS/Layout Artist" title="tbbjr graFX - Developing Search Engine Friendly Websites that Work">
A full understanding of the keywords is required in order to develop the alternative information. It needs to be both Search Engine Friendly and Visitor Friendly. The title tag can be used on several different elements ( img, div, h1, h2, span, etc.) and should never contain duplicate information for multiple elements on the same page. Google will penalize for repeated content of more than 5% on any page.
At Fine Line Websites we set up our all of our sites to allow keyword and alternative information management directly in the Content Management System (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal). I am not implying that getting a site listed at the top of a google result page is a simple task but with a bit of effort and a little know how you can achieve a higher ranking.