A little SEO is worth it, whether or not you know what you're doing. You can read the free stuff on SEOMoz to get a good idea of best practices.
Essentially, SEO is a way to showcase your content so it's more obvious to search engines that your site is about whatever it's about. That means:
* Fresh content.
* Titles and subtitles relevant to what you're talking about (no "mystery meat" headlines -- if you're writing about website usability, say "Website usability," not "The business mistake that could cost your customers").
* A reasonable amount of self-promotion: if you know what you've written could help someone, tell them so; if you see a blog that you like, ask to write a guest post.
* In every online interaction, make sure people see that you know what you're talking about -- and make it clear that for the good stuff, they have to pay.
Answer questions on forum(s) related to your niche. Help people solve those problems via Twitter and other social sites. Write in turn about those experiences. Rinse & Repeat.
It's cheaper to cause awesomeness than to buy it.
(c) Adhere to basics, good titles, viral marketing, link building, make it easier for people and spiders to find you site.
I try this sometimes, often people get mad at me for suggesting that my site might help them. I try to be upfront about being the creator, but people still seem to have a problem with people who own things "hocking" them in niche sites.
of course it's worth it...if you're interested in proactive SEO, you need to focus on building relevant, targeted one way links to your site for the keywords you're looking to rank for. Start with long tail keywords (like 2004 nissan altima 5 speed vs. nissan altima) so there is less competition to worry about. As you build authority on those long tail words, it will become easier and easier to get ranked for the harder keywords. Use your target keywords in the anchor text of the links you build (so instead of "Click here" do "2004 nissan altima 5 speed" as the anchor text)
The best link sources are:
web 2.0 site profiles that allow links
web 2.0 blog sites that allow articles with links
social bookmarking
article marketing
blog commenting
wiki links
directory links (though not too much)
Don't go crazy on the number of links you build. There's no set number of links that are too much per day, but what's most important is consistently building links. That way the search engines see you as a long term authority site for your niche.
Also, while on site SEO is a good thing, it really only amounts to about 10% of your rankings. It basically makes it easier for the search engines to crawl your site and determine its topic once they find you.
Essentially, SEO is a way to showcase your content so it's more obvious to search engines that your site is about whatever it's about. That means:
* Fresh content. * Titles and subtitles relevant to what you're talking about (no "mystery meat" headlines -- if you're writing about website usability, say "Website usability," not "The business mistake that could cost your customers"). * A reasonable amount of self-promotion: if you know what you've written could help someone, tell them so; if you see a blog that you like, ask to write a guest post. * In every online interaction, make sure people see that you know what you're talking about -- and make it clear that for the good stuff, they have to pay.
I write a blog about SEO copywriting: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/ Read it for more.