As I've learned from Lisa and others on here, go to
www.selfpromotion.com It explains everything you need to know about do-it-yourself search engine optimization.
I'll do my best to explain the basics and please some of you more experienced folks chime in if I've missed something.
Let's say you want to build a site that gets found for southern cooking.
Step 1 - buy a domain name with the keywords you want to target, for example southern-cooking-recipes.com
Step 2 - Start building your content. You are going to want to create as many pages possible on southern cooking. Add recipes, maybe some background information (history) on southern cooking. You could even setup a section where people can submit their own recipes to help your site grow.
Step 3 - start submitting to the major search engines as described on
www.selfpromotion.com Also follow the guidelines for your page structure to make sure each page is optimized. For example you have to add meta tags at the top of every page. This is HTML code that tells the engines what each page is about.
Now it's up to you to keep building content and continually promoting your site. Write articles for article directory sites. Create a blog and link your blog to your site. Partner with other webmasters with sites on cooking to help draw in inbound links.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell. I have learned a lot from Lisa's site and can write about it but I haven't put my plan into action yet.
Hopefully I'll have the success story to go with my knowledge soon.
Anyone have anything else to add?