Obviously every SEO project is unique depending on competition, but I'm looking for just the MUST DO basics for creating an any effective SEO...

It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to getting search engine traffic because there is so much out of date information being circulated.
That is why it is always best to also learn many other traffic generation methods like viral marketing for example.
Not only is there out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned.
The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.
Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.
Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.
Basic SEO
1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.
Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.
2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.
3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.
Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.
Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.
4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.
I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.
5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.
6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.
7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.
8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.
My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.
9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.
10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.
Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.
My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.
More SEO Tips
Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This page will explain most of what you should focus on along with what you should forget about.
If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings before you part with any money. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
The author, Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles with all sorts of tips for work at home webmasters. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com

Every business with a website should make search engine optimization -- trying to get your site as high up as possible on Google and Bing search-results pages -- a part of their growth strategy.

At its most basic, "SEO" means finding ways to increase your site's appearance in Web visitors' search results. This generally means more traffic to your site.

SEO Basics:

Monitor where you stand Keywords, keywords, keywords! Link back to yourself Create a sitemap Search-friendly URLs Avoid Flash Image descriptions Content Social media distribution Link to others Title Tag Meta Tag (description and keyword tag) Body Tag Submission to Search engines Submission to Directories

The most advantage of SEO is :

improve the Visibility, Accessibility, Repeat Business With SEO, Targeted Prospects, improve the traffic on your web site, useful to marketing your business.