I have a somewhat unnusual setup for vinyl ripping, and I like the results a lot.
It may seem a lot of work but once you do it a couple of times you just do things automatically

And the results are great IMO.
The very first thing you have to do is to clean the record. It makes a huge difference. A vacuum disc cleaner would be the ideal, but since I don't have one I just wash it with
plenty of water, a piece of synthetic velvet, and a drop of neutral soap. Your tap water may be too hard (= too much minerals that can stick to the vinyl as the water dries), in doubt use distilled water. The synthetic velvet (the kind used in sofas) has very thin fibers that can reach deeper into the groove, better than most fabrics. I just let the disc dry by gravity, for a couple of hours.
There's a method I've read about for seriously dirty records, but I haven't tried it yet. Cover the surface of the disc (don't cover the label!) with white glue, let it dry for a couple of days and then peel it off - the dirt is supposed to come off with the "mould". I've gotta try this.
Make sure the needle is clean too.
Washing the disc is not for everyday cleaning, just for special ocasions

For everyday cleaning I use a carbon fiber brush.
I don't use a RIAA preamp. I use a DIY preamp with the correct input impedance (resistance and capacitance) for my capsule. It has some gain too, altough theoretically a good 24 bit soundcard has enough SNR to handle the low level from the capsule. Be sure to use an amp with very low noise, a very good high frequency response and high slew rate.
Why I don't use the RIAA EQ in the preamp? It makes the preamp simpler, I don't need precision capacitors, just a couple of metal film resistors. But the main reason is that the RIAA EQ, by boosting lows and cutting highs, makes every transient less sharp, including the CLICKS and POPS. By EQ'ing later, I make the job much, much easier for the declicker (if I use it).
Now if the disc is in very good condition I don't process it too much, I just run the RIAA eq with software and that's it. If I decide to run a declicker, I like the ClickFix plugin for CoolEdit/Audition - it's very good and very fast. As I said, any declicker will work much better with the non-EQ'ed signal.
I can also run some noise reduction with CoolEdit, if the disc has too much crackle and surface noise. There are a couple of things you can do to avoid strange artifacts with noise reduction. First, use a
BIG noise sample with a
big FFT - I use about 2 seconds of noise, 24000 points. It's slow but the difference is worth it. If you can´t get 2 seconds contiguous, paste various smaller pieces together. Don't use the section before the first track (where the needle drops) or after the last track (end of the disc), the surface noise on these sections is much higher than everywhere else. Again, by running the noise reduction before the RIAA eq, the results are much better - not only the noise profile is flatter but if you get some high frequency artifacts they get attenuated afterwards, so you can be fairly agressive with the noise reduction without compromising the sound in the end. But anyway it's always a good idea to use the least noise reduction possible.
The next step is running the RIAA eq.
I can do some rumble filtering after that, it gives you more headroom in case you wish to normalize the track and also gets rid of some "thumps" the declicker may have left. Again my rumble filter procedure is a little bit complicated
First I convert from L,R to M,S (that is one channel gets L+R and the other gets L-R). Most actual bass content is in the Mid (L+R) channel, so I do a gentler filtering (5th order butterworth @ 20 Hz), and I filter the Side (R-L) channel a bit more (6th order butterworth @ 40 hz). This is very conservative, you can use higher frequencies if you wish. Then I convert from M,S back to L,R.
Next, normalize if you wish, downsample it to 16 bit for CD recording or convert it to mp3, flac, ogg or whatever you like.