A fantastic tool that I have used to get a high ranking quite quickly is Wordtracker. The upgrade is worth its weight in gold. It will allow you to enter your keyword and evaluates the competition on that keyword on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

This will allow you to target the keywords and phrases that don't have a lot of competition which will help with you ranking.

I use this daily and used this for my meta tags and for saving myself a small fortune on Adwords.

All the best,

Michelle