"Basic SEO"?
mseebach: Basic "white hat" SEO is two things:1: Making sure your site is visible to search engines. Make sure there are meta-tags, that navigation, headers and text is text, not images or flash. Have a sitemap. Make sure links to pages contain a good description of what's on the page.2: Making sure someone's linking to your site. Pitch to blogs to get them to talk about and link to your site. Comment on blogs, putting your website in the "website" field. Have good content that people will want to come to and share - the best way to be visible is for get other people to do your promotion for you.The reason it should be a niche, is that when there isn't too many people writing a website, it's easier to rank high for a search term. If you picked generic technology news, you'd be hard pressed to break page 10 on Google. If make a good site about how to grow your own organic hamster food, you could make page one with little effort. Picking the niche is as much basic SEO as the technical stuff for this "trick".Finally, TANSTAAFL.