SEO is a vital part of any business with an online presence, you need to be able to work hard to achieve a first page placement, SEO can be done in a number of ways and it is also scalable. Sometimes you can achieve a first page ranking without spending any money at all, but the chances of this is low. You have to invest in great quality content before you begin any SEO campaign, this is the foundation of SEO and without this you would find it a struggle.
There is tools out there that allow you to manage posts on schedule, this is to maximise your reach when posting your articles and content. Your goal here is to reach out to people in your field and ask them to link to your content, if your content is not thought provoking or interesting you will struggle with this task. You have to ask the question would you link to this content to understand if they would link to your content, if the answer is no then develop this content until you can say yes you would link to it.
A backlink is where you add hyperlinks to another website, example (Wikipedia). Here we have linked to Wikipedia, the reason we used Wikipedia as a back link is that it's always good to link to authoritative sites. A backlink is a vote of confidence and google will see it as someone confirming that your website adds value to the internet.
As a small business you might not have the resources to carry out SEO in depth, here is where you learn parts of SEO yourself and there is many resources across the web to help you get started. Firstly start off by going to googles resources and what we see as the best resource is Google themselves, even though they don't tell you exactly what you need to do they do tell you what you can do to improve your results in their search engine.
This will give you a good grounding.