1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to. Due to Google's aging delay for all new domains (see this forum thread), your best bet is to use an existing domain/website if at all possible. If you're redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect to wait a good 9-12 months before your site will show up in Google for any keyword phrases that are important to you.

While I feel that advising against obtaining a new domain is perhaps not the greatest idea in the long term -- it's always best, I feel, to own your own online real estate -- it's good to remember that, in the early going, your new website is not going to skyrocket right to the top of Google search results.

That's not to say that SEO isn't important -- in fact, it's essential if you want your site to get stumble-upon traffic from people who are looking for what you're selling or talking about. But what this does mean is that your early focus should be on building your audience one at a time.

As I write this post, pingVision still does not come up on very many Google searches. We launched the site early this year, but due to client work we neglected site upkeep for too long. Even now, I kick myself for not blogging here more often.

Just a few days ago, I launched a personal blog where I'll be writing more about design, Drupal themes, CSS, interactive media, DVD authoring and so on, and I'm pretty much resigned to it's being pretty much invisible to Googlers and Yahooligans searching on those topics for the next year or so, at least. That hasn't prevented me from adding a dynamic Google sitemap and keywords module. But I know that this is more like planting a tree than planting a garden.

What can change that dynamic is getting noticed by others. That means reading others, and posting comments. I'm not a big fan of link-exchange proposals -- it just smacks of artificiality to me. But if you write about others, linking to their posts, they will notice you, and come looking. And all it takes is a prominent link to you, posted by one single person who happens to have a lot of traffic, to change your site's traffic by an order of magnitude, or more. (See Wikipedia: Slashdot effect.)

In other words, while all the SEO sites out there have very sage advice, don't let it totally dominate how you think about your website. Especially when your site's out there somewhere in the long tail, it's essential to remember that your visitors are people, not metrics. And the more of yourself you put into your blogging, the better people can get a sense of who you are, which is the point of blogging in the first place.