Dan Mercurio of DealerLinkUSA wrote a nice article titled The SEO 10 Step Thumbnail Manual. The article reads:

1. Identify Your Competition
Run analysis on what you figure to be the most common keywords searched for your site. Take a look at the websites that rank above you in the search engine results, this is your competition. Create a list of the top five websites and move on to step 2.

2. Quality Link Building
Find out who do your competitor's link partner with? Make every attempt to link partner with high quality websites. There is tremendous value in linking to high quality websites. Find out who your competition has link to it. Take the highest ranking (quality) websites they are linked to, contact these websites, and set up a link partnership.

3. Perform a Keyword Analysis on the Competition
This allows you optimize your website for the same keywords. You'll want to check out your competition's website and optimize the content on your site for these particular keywords more effectively than the competition. Keyword Density, how often a particular keyword appears in your website, is paramount for achieving high rankings in the search engines.

4. Rinse and Repeat
Steps 1-3 are the foundation for search engine optimization. What you are doing is building both a highly tuned website and search engine strategy enabling you to beat your competition both with your website and your website's exposure on the search engines.

5. Your Keywords
Create a list of keywords/phrases that you may not have come across from your evaluations and find out what the popularity is of these keywords/phrases. You may find a niche that your competition does not have, therefore creating more exposure for your website.

6. Let's Go Under The Hood
It's not nearly enough to have the competition' keywords and link partners, you need to tinker behind the scenes, "Under The Hood" of your website to really soup it up! Take your main keywords/phrases and very efficiently place them into your Page Title and Meta description of your website. This is absolutely necessary in order to help bring everything together if you want to rank high in the search engines.

7. Keyword Density (Keyword/Total Words)
Quite simply, use, but don't overuse, your main keywords that appear in your Page Title and your Meta Description.

8. Submit Your Website
Your website needs to be submitted to the major search engines in order for it to be seen in a timely manner. It is suggested to only submit a few pages a day to a couple of the major search engines.

9. Check Your Indexing
Go to the search engine of your choice, type in the keyword/phrase you are interested in, and see if your site has been indexed. You may have to run through a number of pages to find your URL.

10. Continue to Refine
Your SEO work is never complete. Getting ranked in the search engines is only the beginning. The on going work required to successfully rank high in the search engines never ends. It's because of the grueling, never ending, process that most people fail at SEO.