[dcnstrct]

SEO is about two things -- site architecture and correct promotion.

Many people can help you with the fundamentals of getting your site together but most of the action is in marketing your site and frankly, having a good site and product that people want to talk about.

Beware of tricks and claims of performance. Many people can do things to manipulate your ranking in the short run but you will be punished long run. Think quality content and alignment with your target audience and you will be fine.

[dshah]

Actually, SEO is about just one thing:

1. Creating exceptional content that is "rank worthy" and that people will link to.

After you've created great content, if you've got time, then do the basics to make it easy for search engines to find that content and index it.

[dcnstrct]

I agree the most important thing is great rank worthy content.

However, if you build that content all in flash, setup your robots.txt incorrectly, or any of a number of other technical snafus then you can screw up your rankings. Hence why it is important to be setup in the right way for the search engines to find you. Otherwise you will miss out on on most of the traffic.

I've done full SEO campaigns with larger budgets and currently manage millions of paid media on search engines and other places.