If you are trying to optimize your website for Search Engines (SEO), it is very important for you to have access to the list of keywords your is targeting. If you are not sure what are the top 10 targeted keywords for your website and what are the top 100, Search Engine Optimization is not going to do any better for your website in that case.
Yes it is critical that you do not skip this step: Keyword Research. You need to have a list of 100 keywords who have good volume of searches in your market. You also need to make a list of top 10 keywords you want to target in your market. These keywords are not necessarily the top searched keywords in your Niche but the more specific and related to your website and offers.
When you have done this step right, SEO will be easy to do. You just need to supply those keywords to your writer to write at least one page of 500 words about each keyword/phrase in that list. You can write this content yourself or you can outsource it to someone else. Without quality related content SEO is going to be very hard and costly thing to do.
For keyword research, I suggest Google Keywords Tool. It is free and it is the most used and quickest keyword research tool online provided by Search Giant Google! I repeat again that Keyword Research is critical to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts so do not skip this step ever.