With Google, Altavista, Lycos and more all using spider technology of one type or another the hints in this article can help you get on the right track. One of the problems of using a third party for your search engine placement is that you will never understand what it is they are doing for you or, in some cases, not doing for you. This puts you at a serious disadvantage to your competitors because you are always dependent on another company and never have full control. Also, it puts you in the position of having to pay for these services each and every month or every time you need to improve your site's performance. This is not to say that you shouldn't use the services far from it.
Commercial services can be a fantastic help.
However, you must understand the process yourself first so that you can control when and how you use those services. Spending 20 hours reading and learning is never wasted and will help you in the long run. The key is to use 5 - 10 words in your Title that you want to be found for. Though there is more required to get you to that point where you are ranked high for similar terms, this is step 1. In your meta tags you can insert a description field.