I'm no
SEO expert, but I'll echo what the others have said. There are no
good shortcuts.
Concentrate on the content first. Trying to get a site to rank high in the search engines if it is not one of the best pages on the Internet for that search term is ultimately a doomed endeavor. You may be able to achieve the rank for a short time, but you'll never keep it.
I have several sites, both my business and some hobby sites, that consistently rank in the top 5 on Google. The reason is not because I am smarter than the search engines but because, for the relevant search terms, the sites deliver the most valuable content.
SEO helps, of course, but without the content to back up the search results, it is meaningless.