Let’s go directly to the matter without any fluff... Onsite: Keyword Density - Don't stuff your keywords. Google is smart enough to understand what is your page about... Adding LSI keywords is very important... I would keep keyword density under 1.5%. No over optimization like bold, italic, underline for the keywords every time in the page. Title Tag - Use catchy title. For example if you keyword is "Galaxy S III Review" you can give title like "Is Galaxy S III really the best smart phone out there? ". When you give a catchy title for a page, user is tempted to click your link in SERP. Lets say you rank for a keyword at 5th position. When people see your catchy title and click your link, your "Click Through Rate" in SERP will raise and eventually G will place you higher... Bounce Rate - When user comes to your page, he sees nothing but ads then hit "back button" immediately... G monitor this data. And you will be penalized if your bounce rate high... You have to make users to click at least once in your site. I did an experiment on this and my bounce rate reduced dramatically. Here is what I did... Lets say I rank for keyword " Galaxy S III review". in the landing page I would have few links " Galaxy S III camera review", " Galaxy S III Break test", " Galaxy S III software review" etc... When user sees this they are more likely to click once of those links. So, they bounce rate will reduce drastically. It will also increase "time on site". Time on site - You can check how long an average visitor says on your page . Some pages will have high time and some will have very low... You need to optimize the low time pages. There must be something wrong in those pages. Thats why the users closing it soon. Unique Design - Create custom code than using default cms like wordpress. Its more likely to gain more authority. Even if you use wordpress try to use premium themes. When you use custom code, there wont be any duplicate contents like you have in wordpress (tags, categories). Same content will be displayed in many different urls... Matt Cutts is saying that wordpress is okay to use. But I don't buy it... Contact, sitemap and privacy policy(*) - Adding contact form wont be enough anymore. You need add some physical address in the contact page. And privacy policy is also important. Google Plus - Create a google plus account and add it your site. When the result shows, it will come with your photo. Users are more likely to click it and G gives authority. Social Media - Facebook and twitter are very important for every site. Create a page buy some likes and followers in fiverr. It doesnt matter if the users are fake. Its a good start and gives you a lot of authority. Rating Systems - Add rating systems where its possible. I added rating system to my blog and gave rating in the backend like around 50 people rated. G digs the rating system. It displayed my post as 1st with rating stars. Less ads and affiliate links- the title says it all... I usually use 2 ad blocks instead of 3. Offsite: Don’t blast comment or profiles links even though its high PR. No follow,do follow Ratio : Make the ratio of no follow and do follow as 20: 80 respectively. For example, 800 do follow links and 200 no follow links. Not the other way around. Anchor Text Variation: Most you know it’s very important after penguin. Around 40% of links to your brand name(or domain name). Other 30% generic terms like “hereâ€, “click†and etc Other 30% for you keywords. Inner page link building: Your inner pages should have at least 50% of the total links to your site… For example if your site has totally 1000 links, 500 of them should be pointed to inner pages. Guest posting & Sponsored Posts: These are types of links G consider as natural links. Guest posts may be hard. But you can buy sponsored posts from payperpost and sites like that… Retweets & Likes : I am not talking about the facebook page likes. I’m talking about url likes. If you have access to around 100 facebook profiles and twitter profiles, you can retweet and like every new post in your site. They work wonders after penguin… These points are made based on experience with number of sites, and some with spending hours researching through the internet. I’m not saying they will work 100%, but it can give you good chance.. Feel free to share your views… Hope this helps…
not sure why this post didn't get any replies. :s but if it's all correct, i appreciate your time and efforts. i'll paste this around and see if i can get some feedback.