Ask HN: "Basic SEO"?
0. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp.1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keywords. If you want people to search for "fishing tips" and find you, then several people will need to link you something like this:    This site has great fishing tips.

2. The more authority these links have, the better you will do. If you get a very high PageRank site to link "fishing tips" to you, you might be immediately first for that query in Google. Or, 2-3 medium links might do it.3. The words you want people to search for need to be used several times on your site. You should have the words "fishing tips" on several pages and you should link to your best page on "fishing tips" by putting that phrase in your own links to your own pages.4. Also make sure you put the keywords you want searches for in the title of your page, and enclose them in H1 tags or other bold/header tags. This won't help very much, but it's probably worth doing.5. Links don't really help you unless they are from a real domain - a link from someblog.blogspot.com will not help your PageRank much at all. Also, the domain needs to exist for a while to help you - something like a year.6. Good places to get links are from your college and high school newspapers, local newspapers, and anyone else who has  a website that would appropriately cover you.7. Some sites have way more PageRank than you might expect. www.cmu.edu is an anchor site for the link graph, and a link from this site will do wonders for your PageRank.8. Here are some excellent pages on SEO:    http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/
    
    http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-two/

You should also check out Mahalo.com. That site is SEOed within an inch of its existence on Google, so take some tips from them but tread carefully.9. In the end, it really boils down to having authoritative links with the right anchor text linking to you. The rest matters very little.