Originally Posted by StarkReality

Choose your domain or subdomain name according to your targeted keywords. Don't try to be a jack of all trades.

Make sure you have optimized title tags, they are one of the most important onpage factors.

Make sure you don't have duplicate content because of the archive and categories. Use a plugin like "all in one seo" to do so. If you post alot and every post goes to just one category, feel free to keep categories indexed.

Now let the fun start: Push all low quality links at it first (social bookmarking, blogfarms, linksdumps, etc.). Don't forget some variety in anchor text and add links to subpages as well, not just to the mainpage.

Then it's pinging time, don't let the blog ping, ping the pages that have links pointing to your blog instead, by far more efficient, will get you indexed in 24h.

You will probably rank pretty high for a few days, once the blog hits the sandbox you add quality links (related established sites, blog directories, etc.). Can take a few weeks for it to show up again, sometimes longer, but it's fun to see a site pop up in the top 3 ;)

Important: Check your competition, check their age and backlinks, calculate the number and strength of links you probably need to get ranked where the traffic is. Don't try to pick up a few confused surfers who made it to page 2 of the search results. You are on page one for your main keywords, or you lose. 80% of the surfers won't ever scroll down after searching. If you are on page 3, it's not much different from page 45 or page 200.