As far as your specific question Dwight, Search Engine Optimization firms for the most part are a joke. Their tagline is "To get your website ranked in the Top 10 listings for your chosen keywords on the top 10 major search engines!". What they don't tell you is:
1) Only 3 search engines really matter to 90% of the population.
2) Your chosen keywords may not be the best for your business and they don't provide keyword and/or industry analysis
3) they may combine your keywords to form 'keyphrases' that are easier to get ranked, yet not searched for as often
4) charge a ton of money to do something most hobbyist webmasters can do themselves.
As others mentioned, the biggest things you can do are easy and done to your own website:
* Keywords in your meta tags, alt-tags, photo names, and used in your website (i.e. content, links, etc.)
* Update your content regularly - the more often your content updates, the more often a search engine will crawl it (one reason large forums and blogs are crawled almost daily)
* Relevant content - search engine algorythms are getting smarter. Having content that is well written and relevant to your website (articles on leatherworking, etc.) with keywords used in a logical manner helps.
* Cross-linking: trading links with related websites (like LW) that have larger followings will help as the spiders will crawl links from large sites outward
* Submit your site to the search engines manually. This isn't a huge task. Half of today's search engines are either owned or fed by the 3 major ones: Google, Bing and Yahoo. Submit to those 3 at a minimum.
* Use tools such as Google Analytics. These are tools the search engines supply to track web visitors and such. What most folks don't know is they also serve the search engines as a secondary submission - as traffic increases, spider scheduling increases.
* Social Networking. Sites like Facebook now allow for Fan Pages where you can set up a Facebook page for your business. You can give updates, sales info, etc to your fans and if you leave the settings "Public", search engines can index the info. They also allow for more word of mouth as someone who sees your posting on a friends feed can share it with others without even being a fan of your page.
* Sit back and wait. This is the hardest step in the process. Most search engines have a 1-6 week backlog for indexing new websites. Even with the process being automated and electronic, their priorities fall something like: News Feeds, Corporate Sites, Active Sites, index backlog, new submissions.
The above is basically what you get from an SEO firm for their starter package of $800...now you have it for free. Do the few hours of legwork yourself and go buy some leather with the savings.
Hope this helps.
Chris