A lot of SEO speak is BS. Just have a read around online rather than go to a course. Just make sure that whatever you read is current (written within the last year or two at the most) so you don’t pickup old and outdated (and mainly now useless) practices.
At the end of the day, with modern search engines, content is king. Meta keywords, descriptions, etc. count towards nothing. They’re too easy to be completely unrelated or too vaguely related to the content to be trustworthy.
Good content (not just crappy, SEO copy), contained in well-formated, valid and semantic HTML will go a long way. Things like selective use of “h1” elements, good page titles and good linking between your pages and other related sites will also help.
Sitemaps are good if you have a large site or lots of content which will be hard for a robot to discover, but some people think that they’re a necessity for any site to be well indexed and this is just not the case.