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All the things you listed are important. As for ranking those factors, I would say #1 would be figuring out the goals of your site.  Are you trying to make money?  Build your brand?  What do you want your visitor to do once they get to your site?  What are your landing pages?  Once you have a better grasp of that, then you can start to figure out what keywords to target and how much effort you want to put into it. On-page factors are important of course, most importantly having quality, relevant content.  If you follow SEO best practices and create content that other people find useful, then you're on the right track. As for link building, MozRank, PageRank etc. it's all relative to what your competitors have.  Once you've identified your keywords, you can take a look at the sites that are ranking higher than you in the search engines to figure out how much effort you need to put into linkbuilding to outrank them. Hope that helps.

The 301 will give you the credit you're looking for.  You can't really control how people link to you unless you're actually creating the link, so you just have to bear with it.  Be sure to emphasize the non-www address when you're trying to get links so you get the full value of the link.  The issue with non-www is that allot of people are accustomed to typing in a www and may ignore any suggestion you provide.

In my experience, the best return you get is when you send your press release to individual editors/influencers. I have used PR Web, but have not found nearly as much value as actually contacting individual editors. Time consuming? Yes. But we've gotten some great press/links back.

Jason - I think you might enjoy this article by Point Blank SEO on link building strategies there are lost of actionable tips. http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

If your website is dynamic (database driven) then you can generate the sitemap using programming language. This way you are always up to date - whenever you add new page it's automatically added to the sitemap - no need to run external application every time that happens. I'm soon going to be recording a video tutorial on how to do it with PHP and DomDocument.

Hi Jason, Yes i'd swap back to the .com, also try and keep the link structure the same as your old site or you will lose all your current search engine traffic. -Brent

Mmm... not really. For instance, if a blog site is linking to a competitor site, study why and how it did it. Maybe it is citing the competitor site in a more generic post related to the industry you and your competitor are part of. Or maybe it is reviewing one of its services/products. In both cases you are legitimate to contact that blog and try to earn a link from it.