Just wondering what stage of building a site that you would do the optimisation. I would have thought this would be very early on so that you can plan your internal links, headings and copy. I also understand that it's an ongoing process, but this is related to the initial seo
Mostly I start with on-page optimization, where in my domain url is linked within my pages using the targeted keyword as the anchor text. It makes my optimization faster and I also use CSS as a tool for SEO.
I would like to choose a wonderful key word for the url and start link building- Blog Commenting so that every user shows interest in clicking your keyword.
In a perfect world, SEO would start before the first line of code is written - even choosing the correct URL can be seen as a SEO task.
Do keyword research (eg google analytics keyword tool) BEFORE you buy a domain name even. Certainly before you choose internal urls or image names etc.
The moment I type the title of the first page after thinking about things SEO is the first thing I consider as Content is King and content is what gets you found so every word should be written for your surfers keeping in mind the bots/spiders need to find you and match your relevance using your text content So in other words right from the start
SEO should begin before you write one line of code or content for your site. When developing a new site it should be considered with every site design decision you make. How you structure the site, what words you use on each page, which pages are linked to in the top navigation, which pages are linked to in the left navigation, which pages are linked to in the footer, which pages are linked to in content on the page, which keywords each page should be targeting, etc. should ALL be considered during the design phase of your site and ALL affect the site's SEO. Once you have your site architecture and all of the above on-site optimizations thought out, then move into on-page optimization of each page... BEFORE you write the page... Once you have a good feel for why each page is going to be the way you designed it, THEN start writing the code. Going through design, mockups, SEO reviews, redesign, redoing the mockups, redoing the reviews... a few times will save you a LOT of time and heartache in the end. An ounce of prevention (or thought/planning) is worth a pound of cure (trying to make an SEO unfriendly site rank).
You may start your optimization process by doing the on page so that your site will be more SEO friendly after that you may do now those off page optimization techniques. Remember that 20 only percent of the optimization process is for on page and the 80 percent is for off page.
I'd say at whatever stage you are right now. If you haven't started to optimize your site, do it now. And most "experts" do say that the off page factors have more impact than the on page, but why not do both. The basic on page isn't all that hard.
It is best to start doing seo when the site has started becoming stable during the process of web design. Ideally, the web design/developer will be able to do things like proper meta description, keyword tags, urls containing keywords, directory structure has keyword appropriately, etc.