1) Dont try and optimize your site for the biggest search for keyword straight away. It's best to start off with a smaller searched for keyword first and the larger ones later when you have some initial traffic coming in.

2) Make sure your keyword is in your title, description and placed throughout your text. This will create keyword focused content pages, which the search engines will love. Also, bold your keywords through the text as this will help the search engines recognise them as your keywords.

3) Content is KING when it comes to search engines. They love content! Creating loads of content filled pages along with your keywords will deem your site as a good, information filled content site, which the search engines will like very much.

4) Backlinks are essential for gaining a top spot in the search engines. You can have one way backlinks or reciprical backlinks. A good way to get one way backlinks is by submitting articles to article directories, posting press releases and even leaving comments in related forums.

5) There is a lot of software on the market which will claim to blast your website anchor text, URL or add all over the internet claiming to get you thousands of instant one way backlinks within seconds! These types of software are rubbish. They basically spam the web with a load of junk, which could do your site more harm than good in the long run.

6) Reciprical backlinking is where a website places your link on their site and in exchange you place their link on your own. There are a lot of link exchange sites in the net that are worth looking into.

7) Having a link on a popular website is a lot better than having a link on a not so popular website. Popularity is measured by a sites PageRank, which is bascially how many sites are linking to it. The search engines will deem your site more popular if you have a link on a PR7 website compared to a PR4 website and thus will rank you higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

In summary, onpage optimization such as having your keywords displayed throughout your pages and in bold etc is very important but the thing that will boost your rankings is the offpage optimization, which is getting backlinks to your site, and lots of them!

I hope this article has been of some help in explaining the very basics of SEO techniques. For more info on SEO you can vist my blog Internet Marketing SEO