hey DD if your not to biz chasing spammers you should come to se chat tonight
I think with learning seo first you should contrate on goog basic site construction with good content and when you start to get se hits - read and attend se chats and try stuff...
asking on a board its hard to soak anything up and what one tells you may not work for you as differnt things work for differnt kinds of sites, time and back links is hard to replace with any kind of fancy seo that someone might tell you...