Search:

YES. Search engines crawls the content in PDF files

Guest Posting and Forums posting is the best off page activity.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Original Content
Keyword Research
Meta Descriptions
XML sitemaps
Robot.txt file
Internal Linking
Alt tags
Anchor texts

Generally it takes 3-4 months to show the results of SEO. And sometimes it also depends on the techniques you followed.

CMS stands for Content Management System.

Unique content, Quality backlinks, less page loading time, website designing.

Google Analytics
Keyword Planner
SEMrush
Open site explorer
Small SEO tools
Buzzsumo