It would appear that I missed the boat with this thread. (Photon, thanks for the kind words).
I know lots of people have mentioned it, but SEO is really a medieval sorcery of sorts. It also doesn't help that Google is already working to transform their Algorithm to hurt companies over optimizing their sites, so personally until that's been flushed out and the repercussions are figured out, I wouldn't put that much money into SEO.
General best advice is to make sure you build your site in HTML/CSS and make sure that all images have alt tags and all links have titles tags. Also make sure that you properly allocate h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 titles to important elements of code. (I.e. the logo or title of the site should be tied to h1, the page titles should be h2, etc.,) Make sure you have tonnes of written content on the site, not just pictures. And last but not least basically stay away from a full on flash site. Even though Google does scan Flash content now, you still won't have the same amount of content that you would on a basic HTML/CSS site.
And a question for others, WooRanks (
http://www.woorank.com/) used to be a great tool for finding out basic SEO tips on a site, but it's gone to a pay model (49 bucks a month... crazy). Anyone have a similar tool, that is also not Google Keywords.