Based on my experience, I have listed here the must have SEO tips for a blog to rank on top in 2014. Design your blog with responsive theme with onpage and offpage SEO, use Wordpress and some usefull SEO plugin like yoast for the optimization. Always try to write fresh and unique article with all necessory information required to understand the topic, Google loves fresh content. Improve search engine visibility by submitting your site to Google and Bing webmaster tool. Improve quality backlinks through Blog commenting, Forum posting, blog roll, bookmarking etc Make your social presence and share your work there regularly to attract new visitors. Devlope Guest blogging to similar niche high PR site to boost your Google pagerank and new traffic. In 2014, Quality is very good tool to have such a good ranking, Quality post, Quality Backlinks (Votes), Quality Blog ... Pro webmaster can add something useful here...
Thanks sharing such a useful post, blog commenting what i am doing for my search engine optimization work, i think i should go for social bookmarking too
Building a social presence is a good way to build authority, especially with Google Authorship or whatever they call it. It ties in with Google+. Google loves that right now.