Good content is where it all starts if your page provides obvious content that is authentic and valuable past self-promoting your services. This will drastically improve your chances of ranking the pages for specific keywords. Making sure there is some media like video or images to accompany your content also keeps visitors engaged but providing a clean user experience on mobile, tablet and desktop will also keep it easy for users to navigate and find digest your content. Having your pages crawled and bot accessible is also key some of the things to keep in mind are having a static URL, content is unique for the URL, no more than 4 clicks to reach the page from any other page, no blocked IPs and a properly setup robots.txt file are some key elements we see clients not having setup correctly. Keyword targeting your pages correctly inline with your content and setting up proper meta data for the page is key. Keep it simple to start target one or two keywords per page on your website and make sure to include those keywords in the title tags, meta descriptions and h1 tags. Be sure your content flows with the keywords and is descriptive. Images on the page should support that subject to which your speaking of.  Have the primary keyword be used in the URL of the page and use descriptive anchor text. Build the site to be easily shared through social networks and keep strong social signals. Have sharing value so those whom share your content will be praised by the value it provides. Add the proper meta data for Facebook, Twitter to render your pages properly during a Facebook share. Always use the appropriate mark-up for the author or publisher and have a XML site maps and schemas that can be easily accessed from the root of your website. Having internal linking structure within the site helps as well with in your content link to other pages with keywords. Above all create content that is valuable and will interest your readers. Typically this is what we will ask from our client then we handle the rest.