Yesterday I found a useful guide in Russian that covers most of the useful tips and tricks in SEO optimisation.
The short book could be find here. It's in Russian, but it could be translated via Google Translate with a similar meaning. It covers the important practises as defining title/keywords etc fields, setting alternative texts to links and images, adding images and videos to pages and posts, be careful about density of keywords etc.
Enjoy the resource. 
2 months ago I deployed a client project online - Оптика Зорница, for optic services, sunglasses, health consultations etc. It started with no budget for advertisements and I had to do at least basic ranking. What I did was the standard procedure:
I have a couple of other things to do, but I prefer doing them step by step - in order to keep regular activity and watch the continuous improvement. Currently I keep the first 2 places for the Optics name (it already existed in many ranked catalogs) and present on second page on "Оптика" search in Google. Google page rank - 2. Target is first page and blog popularity.