Search engine optimization, or SEO, I've long felt is a scam. By that I mean that people who offer to improve your rank in exchange for money are largely scamming. So much of what Google does is well documented, or at least well theorized, and Google itself these days tends to publish hints on its blog. And of course, the Jason Calacanis m.o. is, if you have good content, you'll get noticed.
But there are certainly things you can do to screw it up, and I've learned that pretty well. Google says the two top keywords on CoasterBuzz are "edit" and "quote," also the links on every forum post on the site. Yes, the 2003 crappy coding wears thin.
With PointBuzz being pretty clean and easy to change quickly, I made some tweaks that almost immediately got us ranking behind only the official site, and above Wikipedia (finally). It used to be that being linked to and just having high keyword density was enough, but things have changed quite a bit since then.
I used to think of this as gaming the search engines, but now I feel more like you're just trying to give the best possible profile as to what a page is about. That seems like the healthy approach.
When your talking about getting a business ranked higher than a competitor that's where an SEO expert comes in and fixes things. They can re-write your content so it still reads nicely, is consistent and a search engine will rank it. Its more than just writing good HTML.