Search Engine Optimization is what makes the difference between those who have a great website and no one knows and having all the right people find your site because your site has been optimized with the right keywords to match your topic.
You can try to do this on your own or hire someone to do it for you. Frankly, I prefer to hire an expert because I think I have finally hit my maximum capacity to take on anything more involved than keeping up with what I’m doing currently. I like to use elance.com and encourage the experts to bid for the job. Locally the price ranges is $500 to $5,000. And there’s no way to know whether someone did the work well or not.
Through elance you can find resources at a fraction of the cost of a local consultant. You should check their references and talk with a few of the people that they have worked with previously.
One of the things that has helped all of my sites is to have back links, a major website like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. having a link on their site. Of course writing articles about your topic and submitting them to as many ezines as possible.
Also, if you can get others who have a website with a similar topic give you a link on their site and you place a reciprocal link on your site, it will help both of your rankings.