Best ways to improve your SEO

Too hot (spammy)	Too cold (apathy)	Just right (profitable)
	Keyword Competition
Go for the most competitive words right from the start, before you have enough budget to compete for them.	Take whatever Google gives you but never actively try to compete for the best keywords.	Target mid-tail and longtail keywords on new sites & invest the profits from your initial success to compete for broader & more competitive keywords.
	On-page SEO
Repeat the same keyword everywhere & risk getting filtered.	Don't worry about it & just let Google do as it wishes, missing a lot of great traffic.	Rather than repeating a keyword use a mixture of synonyms, related words, and words forms.
	Content Quality
eHow styled "how to pour a glass of water" content.	Only produce the highest quality content, without regard to cost or budget & leave no money for marketing.	Have a mixture of decent content aligned against keywords & some exceptionally strong featured content that is aggressively marketed. If a page performs exceptionally well, reinvest to improve its depth & quality.
	Site Size
Thousands of 150-word pages just asking to get torched by Panda.	No consideration at all.	Tight website which grows strategically using data from analytics & competitive research.
	Monetization
More ads than content & content so horrible that the ads provide a better user experience.	No consideration of business model, earning whatever AdSense or similar platforms earn.	Light monetization on a new site & more aggressive as the site ages and builds momentum. Lightly monetized "Featured Content" with other pages monetized more aggressively. Frequent use of analytics data to refine & improve monetization strategy.
	Anchor Text
Use the same keyword all the time, asking to get filtered.	Take the links as they come but don't worry about link anchor text.	A strategic approach which combines related relevant keywords & decent amount of diversity.
	Deep Links
All links point to the homepage (Scorching!).	Take the links as they come but don't worry about where they point.	Build a broad base of diverse links. Point links at the most relevant pages. Use analytics & market research data to determine which pages deserve more.
	Link Quality
Nothing but the lowest quality "Free" links & services that can be bought quickly at volume, screaming, "I buy links!"	Take whatever links come, but don't actively build any.	Use a mixture of link types with some being strong & expensive to give the site added stability & some cheaper links to help build out your link diversity & link anchor text.
	Link Velocity
Link building in huge spikes without any baseline link building between spikes.	What is link velocity?	A combination of consistent effort that gradually builds links with occasional spikes from strong viral compaigns.
	Brand
No concern for brand. Our Brand, Our Brand, Our Brand.	Highly brand focused to the point of being so worried about offending anyone & afraid of risk (run everything through legal) that content is watered down & uninspired.	Enough emphasis on branding that some people care about you & you develop both navigational search signals & non-search traffic channels, combined with a willingness to be original and take calculated risks.