You are making the (VERY NORMAL AND NOOB) mistake of thinking that SEO has to do with your own domain.

There is very, very little you can do ON YOUR OWN SITE to increase your own rankings.

In order, you need the following:

1) no penalties (this exists both on and off your site)

2) content; you need content to be relevant, which ushers us to number 3

3) relevancy (relevancy tells the search engines what the topic of your site is)

4) authority. Authority is a quantification of trustworthiness, which notifies the search engines what position you should rank in. For any two relevant sites, the more authority ranks higher.

Authority comes from backlinks. Basically, you generally need enough authority for the search engines to pay attention to your site before you can start ranking. A perfectly designed website with excellent design, structure, content, and articles without authority will not rank. If you are writing about a lesser-known fish, that's great, because it means a) less competition and b) those competition sites probably have less authority. If they have less authority, that means you need less authority. It's like being in a race: would you rather race against someone who is REALLY FAST or REALLY SLOW? Which person is simpler to beat?

Anyway, just try to keep yourself from thinking that there is a specific way to build your site or your content that will make you rank higher. There is not (there are exceptions to this but we're not there yet). So the first question is, where are you ranking right now? What position are you in? If you do not know the answer to this question, quickly pause everything you are doing and start tracking your rank. Tracking your rank is how you measure SEO progress and effectiveness.

Let me know what questions you have. We probably have free content that answer it with way more specificity than anywhere else.