There are quite a few things that you are going to have to do in order to get your site optimized for the search engines. Far and away the most important is building links that point at your site. The most important factor is ranking site is links so this is something that you are going to have to put a real effort into.
The main activity in search engine optimization is building links. The number of links that you have pointing towards your site is far and away the most important thing when it comes to getting your site to rank well in the search engines. In fact you can do everything else wrong and still rank well as long as you get the link building right. While the goal is to build as many links as possible it is important to keep in mind that some links are more valuable than others when it comes to SEO. The value of the link will be determined largely by the page rank of the site that the link comes from and how closely related the topic of the linking site is to the topic of your site. The ideal link will come from a site that has a page rank of ten and is in the same niche as your site.
The most important thing when it comes to building links is the anchor text. This is the text that is used in the actual link pointing at your site. This text is going to determine in large part what keyword your site is going to rank for. That means that you are going to have to make sure that the anchor text includes the keyword that you are targeting. While this is fairly easy to do when you control the incoming links for example when you are submitting articles. However when somebody else links to your site you really can't control the anchor text that you use. The best solution to this is to make sure that you use the keywords you are targeting in the title of your site. Most people will use your sites title as the anchor text.
There are a lot of ways that you can build links, and you will probably need to use a variety of techniques. If you are lucky and you have good content on your site other people will link to you naturally. Most sites aren't that lucky and have to go out and build links themselves. There are lots of ways that you can build links to your site, the most common are to submit articles to directories, to comment on other peoples blogs and to use your profile on forums. These are just a few of the options there are lots of other ways that you can build links to your site, you just need to look around and you will find lots of options.