Everyone has their favorite lists, and online marketers will tell you to write about lists for success. Here is a list of the 3 things I keep coming back to as the most important factors for ranking well in the search engines.
I find that whenever I concentrate on these three items I always meet with a measure of success. If you have not guessed yet...these are keywords, content, and links. These should always be at the top of your checklist for any kind of website or blog, and are integral to the special link wheels we will be learning to build that utilize the power of RSS feeds.
Sometimes it is suggested that you need a lot of keywords, a lot of content, and a lot of back links. I would argue that you better concentrate on quality and relevance. This means you need to learn how to do keyword research, learn how to write and edit copy, and then learn the best way to get back links.
LinkWheel Sage and RSS Mage will go a long way in producing high quality and relevant back links.