Nice educational post. Would like to emphasize on two important tips for SEO users who are quite new in the industry. For item number 3, backlinks - do it legitimately and do not buy it. lastly, there are now many SEO tools like Colibri (http://colibritool.com) that integrates many of the essential aspects like Google position checker, keyword density, traffic estimator, etc...
I use Colibri Tool - http://colibritool.com/?rd1 - I think it's the best tool in competitive analysis cases. Apart of its basic feature which is tracking your website's position by keywords or keyword phrases it suggest your competitors and monitors their ranking by the same keywords 24 hour per day. It has a readable dashboard, no complicated actions, cool diagrams which show you everything you need, you have an access to the previews of tracked site's which is very helpful and gives you a fantastic view on everything. Colibri also monitors social Twitter and Facebook mentions, backlinks and Page Rank. I really recommend trying with almost all features for free in 14 days, really cool and useful stuff.