Common Sence Search Engine Optimization for Web2.0 startups - SEO is neither good or evil!

In my contact with many companies there is a lot of talk about SEO, search engine optimization. Everyone knows that Search engines as Google are incredibly important to your sites success, but many seems to focus solely on SEO.

So here is my thoughts on Search engine optimization:

Follow standards
Be aware of how SEO works and follow optimize titles, keywords and styles when developing your site. Google should have index every dynamically created page of your site, and they all must have effective page titles.

Get external links to your site
Optimize your PageRank by getting links from sites with high PageRank. When submitting news, do it blogstyle and ping bloggindexes such as Technorati and others. Use Digg and digg-clones to get coverage of your blognews. Convince other blogs to write about you.

Focus on your users
Design your site for your visitors, not for Google. Don't focus too much on the SEO, a great site will get a high PR anyway, and happy users are more likely to link to you than unhappy ones.

Use the Long tail
Take advantage of the Long tail effect - when writing news, avoid general titles and try to be unique. It's probably easier to show up on the first Google result page for "Alchemists in Lithuania" than it is for "USA".