Outsourcing Help

I've built a handful of websites in my life but have never done anything in the way of SEO. At the moment I'm building my main site that I really want to try hard to monetize properly. I've gone through and spent many hours reading this forum and everything else I could on this subject, and so far all I've done is paid for a month of buildmyrank and submitted 20 or so articles. I was all gung ho about doing all the SEO myself, but now I'm pretty overwhelmed and leaning towards outsourcing whatever I can. I've read through the linkpushing thread and Xrumer thread, and both sound good, but still not positive what direction to head in. This site is my baby and I don't want to do anything that would even possibly get my adsense banned or fall out of favor with you know who.

I've also read how people are doing research on keywords and competetors keywords, their rank, etc. This is my problem, I'm not even 100% sure what keywords to target at the moment, and this is the type of info I could use. I mean I know in general what keywords to target, but not a calculated specific plan and number of them. I'm looking for some fairly specific advice here and to be pointed in the right direction, but whatever it is, it needs to be super duper whitey white hat. Thanks for any help.

By it's very definition SEO is somewhat blackhat. Search Engine Optimization - The willful and deliberate attempt to game a computer system in order un-naturally achieve the maximum possible search engine results