Good SEO can make or break the success of a site.
SEO is a science and it is one that takes a long time to learn and constant tweaking once you have learned it. It is a moving target where requirements and recommendations change based on numerous things. I have been around web design for over 15 years and keeping up with SEO is my hardest challenge.
I have been programming since the late 1970's and moved into web development in the mid 90's. As I was building sites I would pick up bits and pieces of SEO along the way thinking that SEO was an afterthought of building a good web site. I could not have been more wrong. Over the years I have developed some pretty good SEO practices but I am by no way an expert. Experts in SEO focus on that area and that becomes there main goal.
I have realized that if I am going to support my customers in the best way I needed to bring in someone to my team that really understood SEO and so I did. And it made a tremendous difference in the sites that I was developing for my customers. She has taught all of us on the team the importance of how to properly use tags, structure pages, include keyword phrases in our content, the amount of content we need on a page and how to optimize our pages for good search structure.
Now what is the point of my response to your question.
I want you to understand that SEO is not just a search process but an entire page design process. There is much more too it than adding a description and a few keywords to a head section and thinking that your page is optimized. SEO has become a science and it is an evolving science.
Find someone that can work with you, to teach you the basics, and there are some very good people on this site that will be willing to help you. Read through the posts on the changes that have occurred in SEO over the last few years and start designing your pages and content around those changes, keeping in mind that SEO is evolving and changes will come to how pages are viewed by the search engines.
Don't get discouraged and do not believe all the crap that you read about this guy and that guy that can take you to number 1 in Google in a few weeks. In a highly competitive market being number one on Google is like winning the lottery. The odds are about the same also.
But getting on the first or second page is very possible and that will bring you a lot of traffic.