SEO is a type of online marketing that refers to optimizing your website so that it is looked upon favorably by search engines. Ultimately, you want search engines to see your website as being relevant to your targeted keywords (i.e. the keywords you feel your target audience would search on to find your website). There are a lot of techniques to try to optimize your website, but the number one and most important element is content. You must make sure you have relevant content on your website for the keywords you are trying to come up for organically within search engines. Note: SEO affects the organic results only (not the sponsored-paid listings). Hope the helps to put things into perspective.

earch Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Snake Oil.

Beware of SEO promises. Anyone who makes wild claims to increase your web rankings through magical SEO techniques is just trying to scam you out of some money.

Whatever tricks they think they can get away with have already been thoroughly dealt with by Google. If anything, utilizing some SEO techniques can serve to get you DE-listed from Google, so be careful.

The best way to get your site higher up on Google is to write good content and get as many other people and sites to link to your site as possible. That's it.

SEO helps popularize your website. Try link building through directory listing, article submission, discussion forum posting etc, which are potent tools to get good search results on Google, Yahoo or any other search engine. I've read on many tools available for SEO and I'd suggest that you can at least start with article submission services.

You can read in details how it works: http://seo-services-experts.com/article_submission.htm
Hope this info helps.