I would also start following the googleblog and Matt Cutts' weblog and reading the webmaster guidelines. Tons of very good advice there. Google might be secretive about their exact search algorithms, they are completely open about what you should do to do well in the search rankings. Of course there's more then Google, but let's not complicate things yet.
In other words, there are no secrets.
There's on site optimization, see for an informative article (on wordpress, but the principles are the same for any site)
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
On site optimization comes down to quality markup, using good titles, keywords, urls, a good link scheme within your site, etc
There's off site optimization: getting quality links. That's basically marketing, getting known, maybe some advertising, etc One way to get good links is to have good content in the first place. Very important I think.
So, I don't think there are "secret" SEO techniques. I also don't think SEO is hard. It's just a bit of work. First to find out what you have to do (reading and keeping track of all the good info there is). Second to implement it all. getting everything right on your site takes some time, and marketing your site as well.
pickle wrote:I'm not asking for techniques (that may come later

), I'm just wondering if it's worth my time to try & increase her page rank myself, or should I just resign myself to the fact that I'll never be as good as the SEO firms & hire one of them.
I guess I should add that the website is pretty small - less than 10 pages.
I would say it's worth your time. You can use all the knowledge you pick up in the process for each site you build from now on. And if it's only 10 pages, it'll probably not take too much time to optimize everything on site.
Last, I think the time you have to spend finding a good and trustworthy SEO company is better spend on doing stuff yourself. There might be good companies out there, but there are also a lot of bad ones. To figure out which ones are good and bad you have to know enough about proper SEO yourself.