In most cases 60% of a site's traffic will come from search engines.   Having your content easily accessible to be indexed by a search engine is important.  Optimizing for search engines should be planned during the creation of the website.   Most websites are managed through a Content Management System.  These systems, for the most part, have taken optimization into account.   They will provide a basic platform to begin an optimization process.   These include easy to read URLs, inter-linking pages and clean code.

• Outbound links to relevant sites, almost like a second opinion of the topic that you are covering.
• Videos on the page topic that can be hosted locally or at a site like YouTube.
• Enough text on the page to properly describe the topic.
• Images that help describe the topic covered on each page.

Optimizing for search engines shouldn't be a secret thing.  You are trying to be the most public can be with your site.  Search Engine Marketing is about being as open and available as possible.  So why shouldn't your search engine optimization consultant? 

Search Engine Optimizations can be a small job or a huge job depending on your current status.   Having a long site history, a good product, lots of content on the site and a good amount of traffic already from the search engines makes the job a bit easier.  There are many techniques to increase traffic from the search engines as well as from other popular sites online.

One example is the Yahoo directory.  It creates a back link which is important for many search engine algorithms which count it as a "vote" for the site.  The directory placement also provides traffic on it's own.  This traffic tends to be quite good and full of buyers.  

A website needs to take SEO into consideration but your priority is to get across your message, make a sale or gain contact information.