If you are willing to put a serious effort into learning and implementing SEO, then you can set yourself up for life. Sure, of course you have to work hard to make it come true, but it can be so incredibly worth it. You must start at the beginning with all the foundation information and knowledge so you will have a real understanding. Just hold off on starting your site until you know what you need to do - you will avoid a do-over. So with that we will take it from the bottom, first, with some foundation laying.
If you don't have the desire to learn to do SEO just call
Understand the difference between on-page and off-page optimization. You will need to learn how to implement optimization for both situations. The reason you must learn about this is because this is what SEO is all about. Of course you will need to abide by whatever the latest protocols are as determined by the search engines. And all of this will only happen when you practice both on-page and off-page SEO perfectly. Understand that your keywords are the backbone of your SEO campaign, and if you can find the right keywords, then you can achieve the traffic that you're aiming for. Do some extra reading and study about this so you know which types of phrases you want to rank for. The more targeted your keyword phrases, then easier it will be all across the board in your marketing efforts. So that is where the notion of the long tail keywords come into play.
Stay away from blackhat SEO because it will get you nowhere because your aim is to build a long term business here, rather than aiming for short term goals. If you want to learn about it, you can, but you really need to take care about the whole proposition.
Yes, some blackhat methods are powerful, so we leave it up to you as to what floats your boat. The opposite of that is whitehat SEO, and that is the mainstream and acceptable way to approach it.
The kind of approach that you take towards SEO ultimately determines how successful you are. Just avoid those completely because you will have to start over at some point later on. You can achieve the things you have read about with SEO, but it is best to do it with proven methods. Get the initial part right, and focus on straightening your basics first, and this will allow you to slowly and steadily move in the right direction. SEO can get boring, but it is something that has to be done if you want those search rankings.