The techniques that follow are ones that I routinely employ when I am looking to establish my presence in a niche. These skills should be applicable to any niche, though if you are looking for the post profit, you should do the first step many times until you find a stagnant niche you will be able to easily dominate and bring in lots of profits.

Know your Competition
Your competition is a gold mine for data about how the search engine is treating the term your competing for. Look into how much content is on their page, how long they have been around, how many links they have, who links to them, how fast they are gaining links, if they are still growing, etc. It is important to look at growth and freshness of the sites that are winning in the niche. If the sites are growing fast, your site must grow faster. If the sites are barely growing, and have no new inbound linking - congratulations, your job just got easier.

Look at where they are getting their links. Many times you will be able to exchange links, or get free links from the same places they are getting their links. This will also give you a good idea to how much work they have done to get where they are. This will allow you to estimate what it will take to dominate that keyword. Hopefully it is worth the effort.

Optimize your Page
To optimize your pages you need to properly use h1 tags, titles, and content to create a coherent message about your page. Beyond that, there really isn’t much to standard SEO techniques. Once you have optimized your pages so a spider can easily determine what the topics of the page are, then you can really optimize your pages for success.

The real optimization of your site should be concerned with marketing. How are you going to make people talk about your site? Giving away something free is a great way to get links to your site and build volume faster than your competitors. Creating a way for users to contribute content is another way. Image hosts are quite popular. What if you created a free image host that linked back to your niche site with each post, and you marketed this image host in relevant forums. That is one way to optimize your site for success.

Get Creative
Putting an image host on your site is obviously not the only way to build a user base, and get incoming links at the same time. There are many other methods that can be deployed on your site to do this. Remember, the key is that you want to be able to get content and incoming links *faster* than your competition.

Be social. Your site does not have to be a social networking site, but you can integrate with a social network in a creative way to bring users who are savvy enough to potentially help you build some links. If you put social aspects on your site it is a great way to build content though.

Make your site fun! Did I just use an exclamation point? Well anyways.. A site that is fun will attract users, and more importantly get talked about. You would be surprised at how many great one way links you can get just by having something fun about your site.

Winning in the search engine game is about applying a strategy over time. Even if you make it so your strategy involves setting something up, and momentum building from user interaction. There must be some sort of movement with your site, or it will go stale.

I enjoy travel a lot. So I decided to setup a blog exclusively about travel and various destinations around the world. The site is Vacation Lair.Since there is so much to talk about, and so many great places to write about I will try to keep posting daily. It is really quite fun to learn more about different places in the world.

My newest wordpress site is Property Video Blog. The focus of this blog is to organize tutorials about various subjects of investing in real estate and allow people to learn while they watch these tutorials. These tutorials come are not produced by me, but come from a myriad of different sources, so my role with this site is simply aggregating the useful content, and dismissing the junk.

Of course, besides aggregation, I am also trying to add value by making useful comments about the tips that should help the information sink in better.  Hopefully it becomes a legitimate value to visitors.