The best advice is still go for long-term placement and rankings, design your site and write your content towards your audience and your keyword density should be fine (assuming you know how to write; if not, have someone else do it for you). Get a few reputable links from related sites and go from there. You don't absolutely need meta tags, keyword stuffed image alt tags, etc... to rank well. However in general using these won't hurt you.
Basically, don't think about SEO that much when building your site and you should have a site that will rank nicely
As for Blogs, the only important item I'd recommend is making sure your URL is a permalink and has no ?parameters in it.
Nothing new here, just an affirmation of basics. Fancy techniques can get results but often change really quick.
