You can't beat Wordpress for its SEO features.You can very quickly make site wide changes to your SEO strategy as Wordpress is much easier to maintain and update than traditional HTML pages.

Firstly, you need to ensure you have set your permalinks correctly.  this is best done right at the start, during your Wordpress installation. 
The default setting is completely meaningless for the search engines (?p=xxxx where xxxx is a number relating to the post) as far as SEO is concerned.

If you change this setting so that the post title is included in the URL then it is much better for the search engines.Make sure that each post title contains the keywords you are targeting and it will help your search engine rankings.

On top of this there are free wordpress plugins that you can use to set your meta tags (i.e. meta keywords plus description) for each post.

Despite what you will hear, these are still very important for your search engine rankings and if you can set them for each individual page, it will help you in the search engines.

When you update your blog, some of the more powerful plugins can instantly notify the search engines of your updates. This will send the search engine spiders swarning to your website.

A good Wordpress Tutorial will tell you all about how to do this and more, and the Wordpress Demystified program is the best that I have found.There is indepth SEO information as well as how to optimize your blog for the search engines.

It is not difficult to set up your Wordpress blog and optimize it for the search engines.There are any number of free Wordpress plugins which will help your search engine rankings.With some off page SEO you can start to dominate the search engine rankings.

But if you haven't done all of the on-page search engine optimization then you will find yourself struggling to beat the competition.If you plan out and optimize your Wordpress blog then there is no reason for you not to reach the top of the search engines.