Great thread Tommy, i will definitely be using some of your tips to improve my sites!
Unfortunately i dont have any ideas to add however i do have a few questions for you regarding #6 that if you answer will most likely help some other people out too. This would mean i contributed atleast a little bit lol.
Anyway here is the scenario and quesitons...
Lets say i have a website that talks about different snowboards , different brands, freestyle boards, mountain boards etc etc.
I do my research and realize that a long tail keyword "What is the best snowboard for freestyle riding" gets searched 100 times a month. Now one of my pages on the site already talks about freestyle boards so i search long tail keyword in google and find that this long tail keyword is easy to rank and my website is already ranking #10 for it but the page is clearly not optimized for this long tail keyword its going after a much bigger word freestyle snowboards.
QUESTIONS
Would it be better to edit the existing page that is already ranking #10 so that it is better optimized for this word (maybe mention long tail keyword 2-3 times on this existing page...) ORRRRRRRR
Would it be better to write an article on this long tail keyword? If we write an article should make the title of the article "What is the best snowboard for freestyle riding?" or should we name the article Best Snowboard for Freestyle Riding ?
Also when we write an article would it be a wise decision to link to existing page that talks about freestyle snowboards? Maybe say something along the lines... There are many snowboards out there that are good for free style snowboarding (for a complete list of free style snowboards click here) but for the purpose of this article we will only go over the top 3 rates free style snowboards yada yada yada...Would the link benefit our SEO at all or there is really not point of linking to your own site?
PS i dont have a snowboarding site this is just a made up scenerio. ...