In Germany, Google may not have the jurisdiction to make laws, but with a market share of more than 90 percent, the Google Guidelines for Webmasters could easily reach such a status for everyone who wishes to successfully operate their websites. Seeing that the link to the guidelines has been mentioned often but has never really been discussed, I want to make up for that now. The guidelines are separated into three areas: “design and content”, “technology” and “quality guidelines”. Additionally there are a few words at the beginning about what should be done once a new site has been finished.

When your website is finished

Make sure that other relevant websites contain links to your website.
Links are fundamental for Google. They are using links for both the ranking as well as the discovery of new sites. You should therefore make sure that your site is being linked by others. It is interesting to note that Google emphasizes the need for links to come from relevant sites, meaning sites with the same or a similar subject matter. This should mean that a link from the DMoz-directory with the fitting category will probably be seen as relevant while a footerlink from any [Viagra|Pron|Poker]-site will not.

Submit your site to Google through the following link: http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
We can agree to disagree on this one – for years now, we get our sites indexed without registering them as long as they are linked well enough. Though it will surely not harm if done.

You can also submit a sitemap within our Google Webmaster-Tools. Trough your sitemap, Google Sitemaps receives informations about the structure of your website and can then increase the rate at which your website is checked.
A rather new part of the Webmaster-guidelines but one that is all the more important. Create a sitemap in the XML-format and add it through the Google-Webmaster-Tools. In the future, Google will regularly read this sitemap which makes it much easier for them to index especially extensive sites. Additionally, the Webmaster-Tools will let you obtain a few interesting informations about your project (backlinks, crawlerbehavior).

Inform all websites that are relevant to you that your website is online.
Similar to the first point. Make sure that your site is linked. Depending on the circumstances, press-releases and similar actions can be helpful.

Register your Website with important Directory services like the Open Directory Project and Yahoo! As well as other branch-specific services.
This is still along the same lines: incoming links. The Yahoo-directory has been outdated in the meanwhile since it is not being actively cared for anymore but DMoz is to be recommended. Other, relevant (!) directories can also be useful. Do not overdo it though. Sadly there is a multitude of directories which only exist for their own purpose and who do not offer any added value to their users. Look at these sites from the aspect of whether you, as a user, could find useful information and further links there and then decide if it is sensible to register.

In summary, we can reduce the recommendations to two major points: incoming links and a tidy internal linking are the right base for new websites.