for now just three points from my side, relating to the actual content of your site:
- machine- and human-readable URLs, containing your most important keywords.
Put the important ones first
- site title and description, containing your most important keywords. Again: put your most important keywords first
- on-site linking – that means linking from within an article/story to another article/story on your wensite (not only a generic list "related links")
This could probably be an endless list – however I'll just undeline one more point that is important to me and has been working in the past: focus on your content and always have your readers in mind.
Even if you're only looking for technical solutions, maybe you're not even writing the content yourself – but anyways: without content that matters to your readers, all technical efforts may be useless. Focus on a subject, gather some keywords that matter to you and probably also matter to your readers around that subject – and place those keywords where ever appropriate. And this also has a technical aspect: Search Engines (Google) are keen on finding and listing content that matters to their users too.