SEO 101 - Help

1. Focus on the things you really like. Much better if you'll do sports (that's if you love sports)
2. I build backlinks by submitting my sites into directory sites, social bookmarking sites and do some blog commenting with my site link on it and some forum posting (with the same niche as what i have)
3. Just building backlinks and buying long term links on the pages that are with higher rank than my site.

That's how i do answer your questions

SEO is always a game of patience. One of the best ways to optimize every page is to use wordpress and add all in one SEO plugin. It would really cut a lot of your work short.

The best ways to build backlinks would be directories, article directories, press release. The best way to do this is to basically outsource it.

I've got a product to help you find tons of highly relevant high PR backlinks. See my sig link for a 50% discount WSO.

The first thing you need to focus on is keyword research. Sure, you might know what keywords you want to target... but do you know what keywords your target market are searching for. Would you sooner target a keyword with 1,000,000 competing websites... or 1,000 competing websites? Chances are you can find keywords that will allow you to target keywords with good search volume and very little competition. But the only way you can do this is with keyword research.

Good, you recognise that this is a very important aspect of SEO. One of the things I always do (after building my site of course) is to visit Google Blog Search and/or Backlink Builder

These tools allow you to search for blogs and/or sites that allow backlinks to be left that are related to your own site. Having backlinks on sites that are related to your site will give you a much better ranking with SE's than those on sites that are not related.

Another thing to do is write articles which you can submit to sites like Ezine Article Submission - Submit Your Best Quality Original Articles For Massive Exposure, Ezine Publishers Get 25 Free Article Reprints www.ideamarketers.com or www.goarticles.com Personally, I like ideamarketers as articles are submitted immediately because they don't review them (though they will remove articles that breach their terms or have unsuitable content). You can include links to your site in your 'resource box' with these site. This will provide you with backlinks on high pagerank sites which will in turn improve your own pagerank.

First you need to get your site ranking for 'long tail keywords' which are keywords containing 3-5 words. Once you get ranking for those and start building your pagerank it will be much easier to rank for the high-volume, high-competition niches.

I have actually written a short report called Simple SEO, if you would like a copy just send me a private message containing your email address.