As a web designer you can follow these 10 steps to help a new website with SEO rankings.

Step 1 – Name your web pages with a recognizable filename rather than a jumble of letters. Your filename will be come part of your URL. The file name should be no more than 32 characters including the “.html”.
Good example: http://www.rentingyourhome.com/pricing.cfm
Poor example: http://www.rentingyourhome.com/prcng.cfm

Step 2 – Optimize your title tags with the below naming convention
Page name | Company or organization name
Example: Admissions | Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University

Step 3 – Name all images in the image tag with the “alt” attribute and the “Title “attribute.
Example: <img src="images/rapid-prototyping.jpg” alt="rapid protyping button" title=”rapid web protyping ” />

Step 4 – Fill out Meta tag description-
Example: <meta name="description" content="Fresh Tilled Soil is web design and online marketing firm providing business consulting, user interface design, website design and search marketing services." />

Step 5 – Fill out  Meta tag keywords
Example: <meta name="keywords" content="boston web design, boston user interface design, boston web application and experience designers, boston search engine marketing, boston search engine optimization, boston social media marketing" />

Step 6 – Only use  <h1> tag per page
The h1 tag should be  the heading or topic of the entire page. Having more than one <h1> is considered an error by SEO grading websites. Although it’s not invalid code, it is not the best structure to follow. 

Step 7 – Add locations to the footer of your page. You may want to do this with a js “show/hide” to keep your footer design clean
Example: Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Malden, Newton, Brighton, Quincy, Watertown, Arlington, Belmont, Dorchester, Lexington, Everett, Chelsea, Saugus.

Step 8 – Register your web domain for a long period of time. 1 Year Plus.
Google and other search engines like to see that there is stability with a website and that it is not a temporary spam site.

Step 9 – Add a WordPress blog to your website.
wordpress.org  Updating the blog on a daily/weekly alerts the web crawlers to visit your site as you have new content.

Step 10 – Add your URL to Google
www.google.com/addurl