Include keyphrases early in content (prominence) and sparingly throughout content. Use meta tags. Include keyphrases early in site title. Focus on building backlinks. Not too many every day though, or else it seems unnatural. Make the backlinks come from different sources. Study your competitors. Look at their on page optimization. Make your optimization look NATURAL. Hope that helps
There's also Traffic Travis (free and paid) for checking up on the competition. Well, it pulls data from Open Site Explorer, so it's nowhere near as good as the paid, but still useful for anyone on a budget.
Yes, exactly, make it look natural, rather than writing for robots (GoogleBot, etc). Write for humans and get someone else (who knows nothing about SEO) to read it and give feedback.
Focus on link exchange, social bookmarkings and forum posting. This three are the best off page techniques to build backlinks and rankings in search engine.
SEO has to be done naturally. In that case, build backlinks through blog and forum comments. You have to keep in mind that these backlinks have to have quality. Also you may also build websites that point to your main website. Social bookmarking and on-page SEO are also effective techniques.
1 dircotry sumbitted 2 blog commenting 3 add posting 4 press relese 5 fourm posting 6 social book marking 7 link buliding