Our first advice would be; get a FREE keyword check to see where your website is right now in the search engines and if I can find your website listed, I'll email you a report showing you where and what position.

Make sure your main index page is content rich with text, links and images.

Never use a 'splash page' or an 'Enter Website' page.

Don't use keyword stuffing techniques, especially disguised in invisible text like white text on white background. These don't help your SEO, they will get you blacklisted.

Don't submit your website until it is ready. Make sure that all pages are full of text and complete, without any 'under construction' stuff.

Don't ever use the free submission or SEO programs available on the internet. Whilst there are some that may be good, it's very hard to tell which ones they are.

Submitting to 100's or even 1000's of search engines may well get your website, removed or black-listed at best it will simply get your email address on thousands of spammers mailing lists. 

'Monthly Submission - still necessary?' - Absolutely yes. Google prefers you do it via an updated sitemap.xml which will remove old pages and add new ones to the submission list.

'Watch those inbounds!' - When you get another webmaster to place a link to you on their site you need to make sure they place YOUR keywords in the linking text. This increases ranking for those keywords and is called 'anchor text'. Always remember that the reverse always applies in search engine optimisation. Having no keywords or irrelevant keywords in the linking text can 'lower' ranking. So if anyone is linking to you with the words 'click here', 'this is a great site', 'visit our sponsor' and so on, get them to change it or remove it before it causes problems. See my Google tips on reciprocal linking dangers!

Tables in Your HTML Code

Some SEO 'specialists' have been theorising for while that you shouldn’t be using tables in your HTML code as it will affect your rankings. This is a myth. Tables have been easily index-able by search engine spiders since the very beginning, and anything else would suggest that Google would be penalising the small websites and designer novices. This myth seems to have derived from SEO propaganda merchants trying to promote their own services.

Text Links vs Image Links

Search engines have had no problem following links from images. Images used in the navigation can still be used providing the alt tags match what you would have used in the anchor text on a text link. For the benefit of SEO, it's always best to name your images to match one of your keywords, and always insert an 'alt tag' to describe what you are linking to.