If you want to get your site ranked you should do the following.

Pam Bovaird was the Top Sales Person for 10 months straight at www.seoinc.com. Pamela now owns a Technical Staffing Agency, www.techreq.net and her website is ranked at the top of several search engines for very competitive keyword phrases.

These are the ABC's of SEO.

Keyword analyses
Keywords listed in order of priority.
Writing copy to reflect the chosen keywords in order of priority.
Page naming to reflect the keywords in order of priority.
Links pointing back to the site with a description that reflects the chosen keywords in order of priority.
Consistency throughout the site with keywords in order of priority.
Keywords listed in text as opposed to images so spider can easily read and identify.
Writing source code to reflect the keywords in order of priority, title, description.
Clean source code that does not have a lot of white space so spider can crawl swiftly.
Pages correctly linked to one another so spider can crawl swiftly.

Content is KEY
The more informational your site is the more the search engines will rank it.
Copy needs to be added often and consistently. The more consistent your site is and the more fresh and up to date the information the more the search engines like it.
The larger your site is the more popular it is to be also, because it will have more information available to the user. So start out with at least 50 – 100 pages.

Page Rank
The higher the page rank of the site linking to yours the stronger the popularity vote for your site.
The more links you have pointing to your site the stronger the popularity vote with the search. engines.
There is also an argument that directly related links may be a stronger vote.
The higher the page rank the more the search engines view your site as authoritative.

Site Map
Site Map is important for the spider to have direction on how to crawl.
You can direct the spider not to crawl certain pages also.
Dead pages will stop the spider crawl. Make sure all you pages are up and running properly.

Static Vs Dynamic
Static pages are easier to rank than dynamic pages.
To rank dynamic pages have a consistent template that has static keyword phrases attached to it.

PPC Advertising
Once your keywords are selected it is also good to do some PPC advertising to see which keywords are the best converters. Those are the keywords you want to slant your SEO optimization towards.

It is also good to do your PPC advertising in conjunction with your SEO as you will get action on your PPC ads while you are waiting for your SEO to rank. And, when you SEO is ranking you look even stronger if you dominate the first page with your advertising (SEO and PPC combined.)

Competition
It is important to review your competition’s site and see what they are doing to get ranked. Review the content, keywords and source code and see how they differ from yours.

Reasons not to get ranked
Repetition of keyword phrases is key, but too much repetition is spamming.
Repeating pages from someone else’s site can be considered as spamming, even if you own the other site.
Hidden content is forbidden and can get you banned.
Too much duplicate content can get you banned.
Link farms are a no no.
Google can ban you from the rankings. If you get banned it can take as much as two years to come back.