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You might reach out to brentdpayne on Twitter. He worked for the Tribune for a number of years and gave SEO training to reports and may have some resources and tips he could share with you.

An intresting thing to know would be if the site has already got several inbound links. If not I would definately start up with rewriting the urls with the aimed keywords and redirecting the old ones to the new ones. This is a hard work for sure, but has its beneftis. The actual linkbuilding startegy is another question and it is different in each ad every case depending on the subject of your site. You should try directory listings, blogs and forums to start up.