Not all of us are prepared to do our own SEO. If we're focused on building our site, we're probably more passionate about our site's topic (dog grooming, candy, toys, technology news and reviews, or what have you) than learning the SEO that will take it to the top of the SERPs. Fortunately, you can hire someone else to do it -- but there are a lot of scam artists out there. This article explains what to look for when hiring an SEO.
Writing for SEO Chat has given me the opportunity to write on a variety of issues that I am pretty much just "subjective" about. Nobody likes to be wrong, but nobody can be right all the time (even Nostradamus saw only in part). As Soros stated in his theory of fallibility "everything I say may be wrong, act accordingly." That's the best I can do by way of a disclaimer, now note that apart from the disclaimer at the end of the article, I pretty much write with as much conviction as I can muster, but here is a topic that even "angels would fear to thread;" fortunately, I am not renowned for my angelic qualities.
SEO is a pretty much open and shut case, it either it achieves set objectives or it doesn't. If it doesn't the optimization process has failed. If it works the optimization process has succeeded. The objectives may (and probably will) involve achieving certain ranking positions on a particular search engine in a stipulated time. That sounds easy enough, but we have to consider the environment in which SEO professionals work: the search engines.
Search Engines
Search currently is a billion dollar business. With over a billion searches done every day using the search engines, search engines take their SERPs pretty seriously. The only reason users come is get relevant results, and each of the major search engines want a bigger slice of the growing search market (more users). Sometimes Search Engine Optimization does not help the search engines achieve their goals. And it seems that with the Google Web spam team led by Matt Cutts, SEO could get penalized.
This being said, Google does not mind sites ranking high as long as they got to that position "organically." If the site tries to rank via some other means (such as use of doorway pages or link and content spamming) and is discovered, it is likely to be de-listed.
Another thing to remember is that search engines continually change their secret ranking algorithms, and this makes SEO an inexact science (like medicine) at best, and a farce at worst -- you do a lot of good work, and you don't see any changes. This is actually one of the best reasons why you should have an SEO professional working on your site.
Search Optimization 
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