Most SEOs don’t want to give you the blueprint for how they achieved their rankings. There are several rules of thumb to follow, but the main things are optimizing your on-page content to focus on desired keywords and then to gain as many high-quality and relevant links to your site as possible with the link text containing those keywords.
If you are feeling confused I will point you to the articles and forums at seochat.com. Spend a few weeks reading up on everything there. At first you will be more confused, but after reading enough posts and the advice from quality forum members, you will start to form a clear enough picture. After that it is all trial and error. SEO is a long-term activity, I fully expect it to take 3 years to take full advantage of the strategy I am pursuing.
As for tools for checking things out, I can recommend seomoz.org or digitalpoint.com as places to start.