SEO is hard work!

I have been looking into search engine optimisation over the last few months or so and it is not easy, there seems to be a a number of hoops to jump through to be successful and get to the top of the search engine pages and drive that traffic to your site. Some company's are obviously very good at it but to many like myself when I started it all that seemed search engine marketing was a technical black art. Even when you getting your head around it and start putting in the long hours into your keyword research and then start to optimize your pages by changing your meta tags, meta titles and descriptions to tailor your site to the search engines guidelines you then have to keep stopping and telling yourself this site is also for customers it has to look good so people will use it. Therefore it seems to be a battle between the technical SEO and the aesthetics for the user, if it is not set up correctly the site won't be found in the search engines such a Google and Bing, meaning you can have the most customer friendly site with no visitors therefore no customers, or you could have the top ranked site for a particular search term receive lots of visitors who don't use the site because it clunky and not user friendly and still you don't have any customers? This is where I believe the hard work is, getting that balance so people can find the site in the search engines and then it needs to be designed so people use it. This is hard work indeed.