What is your SEO routine?

Guys just wanted to know what step by step procedure you usually do when doing SEO... like what is the first thing that should be done and then the next and so on and so forth... Can you share it with us?

Is this installing a forum or a blog?

Forum - Work out a good short site title using targeted keywords, work out a good meta description using targeted keywords. Create forum categories for the topics, maybe enter a short description of each forum. Install sitemap generator, submit sitemap to my google webmaster tools, bing webmaster tools and yahoo site explorer.

Blog - Work out a good short site title using targeted keywords, work out a good meta description using targeted keywords. Make .htaccess file writable, create permalink structure with month/day/title of article, make .htaacess non-writeable. Install sitemap generator, submit sitemap to my google webmaster tools, bing webmaster tools and yahoo site explorer.

Install google analytics on both sites, verify both sites in google webmaster tools and yahoo site explorer.

Keyword research is the most important first step to that, list the keywords which your target audience will search for, make a seo web design, submit a sitemap to search engines, then content optimization, then start building links.

Really depends on what phase the project is - are you starting it, or are you jumping in...
If it's just started - then you want to go through keyword research, choosing and building a platform ( carefully, of course, as discussed on the other thread about what kind of a site to build ), linkbuilding, social buzz, promotion, and so on.
If you're jumping into a project that already exists, been done SEO to it's a quite different story...Then you want to analyze how it is - how it ranks, who links in, what is the customer attitude, the brand recognition, what can be improved, and what you'll have to get rid of/change...
And that's really brief.

Its always on-page optimization comes first, from keyword research and everything then followed by off-page optimization which is externally done from link building and so on.

1 Use a tool such as Google Adwords Keyword research tool to find out which search terms ar most popular.
2 Use this info in deciding on your domain name and internal urls etc
3 Write content that includes targetted keywords
4 Weave targetted keywords into code
5 Get links to website with a mix of targetted keywords as anchor text

If you know and understand your targeted audience, why would you be using a keyword tool?

My opinion - keyword tools are only needed when you do not understand the niche your trying to tap into.

Keyword research is very important to know what others are searching for and what words you believe to be important. You will know most of the keywords yourself but keyword tools like GA Analaysis is good to find out what others are searching for.
Improve your website and make every page as specific as possible to the relevant keywords. You can write one page for one or two keywords.
Now comes the time consuming work of finding links for those pages. Link to them with the keyword that is used most on that page.
Article writing, Forum posting and general link exchange are currently the best ways to get the word out and show SEO what your site is all about.

1. Keyword research on google adwords tool.
2. Domain name research, that contain on or more main keywords.
- I'm doing optimization for Joomla websites, but it is not different from the basic HTML optimization.
3. Add h1, h2, h3 tags, meta description and keywords.
4. Add some content and bold keywords words
5. Create backlinks with blog comments, social bookmarks, forum post and other tools...

And after this I'm trying to update my site each day...

For me, It will have to start researching what is your niche or topic, then research for competitors and what they use for keywords. then research your own keywords then on page and off page optimization process will occur after that.

First thing i've done is niche evaluation that includes the competitions on that certain niche, then keyword research, follow by content creation then on page optimization, evaluation of landing page for every key phrase and etc. those are the few things that i've been doing in starting my routine.