The most important steps when you develop a wordpress site.

Permalinks: The first thing I need to change is permalink structure. This is under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is ?p=<postid>, But is not good for SEO. So I prefer to use custom structure  /%category%/%postname%/

Optimize My Titles: By default, the title for your blog posts is “Blog title » Blog Archive » Rich post title”. But I find a important think i.e Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if my keywords are near the start of the page title it may rank well. Another think is that people scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of my listing my page is more likely to get clicked on. I check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title(’ ‘);. This makes sure I have absolute control over the title and don’t have any annoying separator in there. The address url is editable for every individual post, pages. I edit the address url for every post and page. I put the rich keyword in the address url.

Optimize My Descriptions: Give each category a decent description, and I use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that I actually want to rank with.
[Auto generating descriptions is not good for SEO, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one]

Optimize the More text: One of the good featuer of HeadSpace is that I can use it to optimize the more text, I can replace the default “Read more” link with something meaningful for every post. It’s small things like that, that make my site SEO the best.
Image Optimization: Give a good name of the image files and writing good alt tags for images, it can get a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines.
[ If I have a lot of images in my site it is time consuming to write alt tags for each and every images for this we can use a plugins name SEO Friendly Images (http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-friendly-images) it can automatically add image's alt and title tag]

Use Twitter: Twitter is a social networking site. Almost all the “cool” people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, I use Follow me, and Twitter Updater plugins to give a test of the site browser.

Noindex: I Install my robots Meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all unnecessary  pages.
Speed Up Wordpress:  A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on my blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. I use WP Super Cache Plugins to speed up wordpress. It Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary.

Some of SEO Best practices:
Conversion optimization: It is good for SEO to have a option that people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail.

Nofollowing links: This is a important step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to my login and registration pages from each and every page on my blog. The same goes for RSS feeds, subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You’ll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand.