Reciprocal linking does not have the effect it used to.
If you are asking for links right now, stop sending automated link requests. Instead, focus on getting natural links from related sites by using “link bait”, in other words, content that is worth linking to because of its value. When offered a link from partners, make sure their page doesn’t have more than 100 links already in it, look for 20 links max when possible, and also that their site is related to the theme of yours. At last, check that you are getting traffic from the link, or drop it.

“Article swap” and “article partitioning”.
Engage in “article swap” with link partners, and break articles in parts to create a series of them for your visitors to follow (partitioning). Include comments when applicable in all articles (in a different color to distinguish, hint: blue) since it gives visitors great commented content and overcomes duplicate content penalties.

Your internal linking structure.
You want PageRank to be passed to your traffic pages, so avoid absolute links to “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, etc. Here the have a good combination of absolute and relative links is a must. Use absolute links within your content areas, not in you navigation. The PageRank score is directly affected by this. The “run of site links” filter includes internal pages now, so keep this in mind. Also make sure you have a relative link to your home page from every page. You should link to directories or portals that are authoritative as far as your external links. Always use your targeted keyword phrase for the anchor text. It is also wise to vary your anchor text when linking to your internal pages, and it always should match your unique phrase.

A few more words on PageRank.
Any PageRank of less than 4 is not counted by the algo. That explains why Google shows much less back links for any domain than other search engines. You need to gain good incoming related links, not just any links. Again, the “less is more” concept could be applied here as well. Few good quality links always out weight lots of low quality unrelated links from other sites. Outgoing links are viewed from a different angle, and are related to “the theme” of your site. There is an optimal ratio between the quality vs. the quantity in links. You need to get as many links from pages with a high PageRank and a low number of total links in them.

Your link campaign goals.
Set yourself some achievable goals when it comes to links. Be realistic, and try to get one link exchange, article swap, directory submission, forum comment, etc. per day. Verify quality of all links, and use the “no follow” link attribute or directly remove all links from any site with 100 or more links on their page that is not an authority site.

The DTD statement.
This should be the first tag of the head section of your code. The Document Type Definition Statement allows faster and deeper indexing with Google, shortening the time your site will be in the “trustbox” as well. HTML 4.0 or 4.01 should be the standard, and for most cases, the Transitional type should be used.

The title, the most important.
Why? Because there are 3 elements in SEO: the listing (were title is the main element) the click-through (were title is the main reason) and conversion (which is the object of all optimization work) Also, if that is not reason enough (it should) it is the single element that gests indexed and used to list the link text in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). An average of 7 to 8 words length is optimal.

The description.
Used by Google to create a text summary in describing the page if available, so make sure the content of this tag is friendly to the searcher, not the search engine. If you are in a competitive market, this tag is not taken into account, but you should have it for your visitor. An average length of 150 characters is good.

The keywords.
Google actually uses this tag against you, by that meaning it is used as a spam check point for the page content. Also, do not include your niche keywords here, as you will be given your competition tips about your optimization. Put your main keywords across the content instead. Here use an average of 200 characters.
Make sure you are using different sets of keywords per page, in other words, that they are unique to each particular page.

The charset type.
Another element of the head section, this one tells the browser what to do when it encounters certain characters in your pages. Google indexes pages easier with the 8859-1 tag, since it will not do any data encoding, which can take a lot of extra time. The UTF-8 tag involves encoding and it should be used for forms that accept non standard characters, like foreign users from other countries.

Keyword research, the beginning.
Start with 5-10 keyword phrases, create content, optimize, post, maybe publish… Why? Are you building an authority? Then, wait until you have at least 100 pages. Otherwise continue. But 5-10 pages at a time can go a long way towards an authoritative site. Remember, what works… takes work.

Keyword refinement, the outgoing.
Following the previous though. After your initial research, primarily of some data you have form various keyword tools, you need to rely on your web analytics to see how focused your optimization is based on your visitors. That is what “outgoing” means here. You need to look at this information, especially search engine and searcher behavior, and refine your optimization even further, for the cycle of your site.

The importance of content tagging.
This is basically bolding or italicizing of keywords phrases in content. Don’t overdue it. It is recommended to use it for user experience mainly. Doing it right will bring good benefits.

Article marketing and its impact.
Writing articles is a great way to add fresh content to your site that is worth linking to. Now, for a good optimization of the content, add your keyword phrase within the first 20 words, at the of the page. Optimize one main keyword phrase per page.

The return of the niche… and off course authority sites.
Sites within 3-12 pages known as “niche” are OK in Google. You don’t need to target or optimize every page, but you should have one page for every target key phrase you want to rank for. If you are after an authority type of site, then you need daily fresh content with 450-500 words a page. This content can be in the form of daily articles you can host and syndicate for your site. Also, a blog or forum is another great way to generate fresh content.

First things first… the domain name dilemma.
Your domain name should be brandable. Keyword rich with hyphens type of domains are not longer relevant. Focus on a .com since it is the one searchers will enter when not sure about extensions, and is the easiest to brand. As far as registering it, do it for more than one year since this helps with the “trustbox” in Google. If you have many related domain names for the same content it is always good to only take one as the main domain and to redirect (301) any others to it. This way, you can make sure not to have duplicate content issues.

Less is more, when it comes to web design.
Your text content should outweigh your html code. Make sure your code is “search engine friendly”. That is a big different with being W3C compliant. The W3C is too limited, and a lot of code warnings will appear with perfectly acceptable code. Their validation system is simply outdated. You want to be search engine compliant, not W3C compliant. Keep this in mind.

Javascript and CSS, in code or out?
Good question. JavaScript and CSS should be in external files. They will increase page size otherwise. Specially when having the same code for menus or styles on multiple pages, when this can be easily fixed by doing it externally.

Demystifying the page size limit.
There is NOT page size limitation here. There you have it. The 101kb limit thing is absolutely incorrect. But do not take this the wrong way. You need to make sure the size of your page is about 40K on average. Up to 50K is OK. Consider loading time as a factor, and the text/graphics ratio is very important.

Web hosting solutions and their impact.
Use your own dedicated server whenever possible. Make sure you have a static IP address assigned to either individual domains or groups of domains, and make sure that it is clean, by not being in any blacklist.