1. Determine the goals of the new site - will it be an informational site, a lead gen site, or an e-commerce site? The goal of the site will impact what keyword themes you will focus on, how the site architecture is designed, and how in depth the content needs to be.

2. Do keyword research - this is one of the most important aspects of a new site design, or any web design for that matter. Primary keywords on your home page, secondary focused on category pages, and long tail keywords for your product or article pages.

3. Competitive analysis - once you have found the keyword set you want to target, do some competitive analysis for those keywords to get a more focused set. This refined set of keywords should show you the difficulty of obtaining rankings for your initial set and where content will need to be built.

4. Create a search engine friendly architecture - based off these keywords and competitive analysis you can determine layout, navigation structure and how link juice distribution should be focused within your site.

5. Content - with the research, goals, and architecture determined you can now build out your content based on this data.

6. Do usability testing on the new site design - Once you have the basic design completed and the outline established, do usability testing on the design before it goes live. This will show you areas of improvement that will help the overall conversion rate, user experience, and community branding of the design.

7. Keywords in the url are more important with Google over the last few months so make your urls descriptive but not long. Make sure if you decide to rewrite your urls you 301 the old ones to the new ones.

8. If your site is dynamic make sure your urls are all in lower case. Mixed upper case and lower case is a recipe for disaster by causing duplicate content.

9. Don’t use marketing fluff. When writing the copy speak how your customers speak and not how you speak.

10. Understand what your ranking for now and make sure your ranking for the same term later.

10.5 SEO is an ongoing thing. Sharpen the saw, make sure you have a strong base line of what the previous site is doing, watch for 30 days, and revise where need be. Or in other words Wash, Rinse, Repeat