Yes, as you’ve expected. This is just a review of some of the most basic yet effective strategies I have been using ever since I started SEO.
One of the oldest yet effective way (for me) of link building a site is still the Directory Submissions and Forum Postings. Well, I tested it on one of my site and it ranked fairly on the SE’s. Of course you won’t do that forever, what I did was I slowly added other things like Blogs, Articles, Social Book Marks and more. I also tried blog commenting (some say its spamming) it boosted my back links and also helped a lot on my rankings. 
Titles and descriptions are very helpful on your campaign but don’t overdo it. Long exhaustive keywords just won’t do you any good. And if you think that making the title longer means you can add more keywords, wrong the longer the title is, the lesser the relevance of the words inside it. Limit it to 65 characters, while on the description, make it 150 chars.
Keyword Research is really important so be careful on choosing keywords, look for those keywords that are related,highly searched yet have less competition, one of the best tools out there are Adwords and Keyword Discovery so use them wisely.
Targeting long tailed and specific keyword is a must although sometimes it just ranks even if you do nothing. Long tailed and specific keywords are easy to target and they have higher chances of conversions. So you should take a look on that. Also Geo Targeted keywords are a must. This keywords may have very little traffic, but once a user types in those keywords, then most likely that person is really interested to buy.
PR is still a factor but not that much of a factor but still a factor. lol I noticed that if your site has a High PR, lets say PR 5, then most likely It’ll rank faster of course it also depends on how you work it.
Patience is a virtue. If you want to be a good SEO, then you should have patience. Sometimes, no matter how you work your ass off onto a site, It just won’t rank, if you give up easily then nothing will really happen. Its also a life lesson for me as one of my Superiors told me that. Just don’t give up.
You should also have Plan B, Plan C, Plan D so in case you failed on your first strategy, you must have a backup plan or something. SEO is a trial and error thing, sometimes your strategies just don’t work on other sites so you have to think of something. Never forget to ask, SEO’s are easy to approach in my experience
Well those are my 2 cents. I know the SEO Masters know this already and some may even have violent reactions. lol But those things are what I experienced and for me they are helpful. I’m still on a learning process, I still have a long way I just hope I’ll learn more.
I’m also thankful that I’m introduced to this field. Thanks to Sir Mark Tobias for teaching me the basics and introducing me to this field, a great trainer. He has produced a lot of great SEO’s too.
