I don't say that to brag. I was as shocked as anyone would be; I had begun optimization efforts a year earlier, had given up several times, and hadn't even checked my rankings in almost two months. Considering all the idiotic advice I had waded through regarding search engine optimization, I was dumbfounded and amazed to see that some of it was actually on the level.

Are you considering putting out an expense for search engine optimization? If so, do yourself a favor and take some free advice from someone who's been there:

Skip the snake oil. As a writer who offers SEO-related services, that includes me: I can't give you number one ranking on Google by next week. No one can (including at this point probably Google). If anyone could, everyone would, and we'd all be back to square one - which is where most people end up when they embark on search engine optimization. Think long term or don't do it at all.

Any business offering quick SEO results is exploiting bugs in the search engine software to achieve them. If Google or any of the others catch you doing it - and odds are, they will - you could easily be banned from the engine altogether. Doing it legitimately takes more time, but the results are much more reliable and trustworthy.

So the question is: are you planning on being in business a year from now?

Chase Google; ignore the rest. Ever hear the old saw about being a jack of all trades but master of none? Many get themselves into precisely that situation by trying to please every major search engine on the Web, rather than simply focusing on the leader.

At least as of the time of this writing (February 2005), the horse to follow is the one with the big Google logo on its side. Every other engine is chasing them. If you can manage to get decent placement on Google, you'll do okay on the others; use Google as the benchmark.

Be a good citizen by embracing the spirit of the Web. Every ecological system has an essential nature; the difference between survival and death depends upon an organism's ability to successfully adapt to and acknowledge that nature within its own. The Internet is no different.

The Web's nature is one of decentralized mass information, organized by association, accessable easily with little investment in time and energy. Successful websites reflect that nature: informative rather than sensual, organized rather than chaotic, filled with unique information rather than with recycled and thinly-written content. They're good citizens, giving more than they take, authentic resources and centers of information gravity - the perfect adaptations to allow them to survive within the Internet ecology.

The best citizens get the best treatment.

Keep the structure of your website machine-readable and clean. Search engines love plaintext and html anchor links and site pages that are well-structured according to commonly accepted standards. They ignore Javascript and image-embedded text and Flash animation. There's no mystical or profound secret behind what a crawler will take interest in and what it won't; at the end of the day, engines will always give first billing to flat ASCII plaintext and basic html.

Keep your site simple and clean and easy to read by an automated process. Keep your load times as low as possible. Offload as much display formatting data into external css stylesheets as you can, leaving the primary pages to focus on the informative text that the crawlers are looking for.

Don't give them excuses to ignore you.

Stop the keyword insanity. A number of years ago, someone realized that their website got a higher engine rating if they embedded their relevant keywords into their site text dozens or even hundreds of times. At the time, the results were higher placement for a completely unreadable website.

The engines wised up years ago and, for the most part, this trick doesn't work anymore. But even if it did, is this really what you want? Does Google placement mean so much to you that you're willing to destroy the integrity of your site in the process?

By all means, include relevant keywords in your body text; you'll have a hard time getting decent placement without them. But limit keyword embeds to two or three repetitions (including within the TITLE and H1 tags) per page. More won't help you, and instead may incur the wrath of the engines - all while confusing more readers in less time, which probably isn't what you're setting out to achieve.

Top ranking isn't everything; it's not even most things. You're not going to get top placement by tomorrow. It simply won't happen - just put it out of your mind now, regardless of what your neighbor told you or what that nice man on the phone is trying to sell you. It's a fantasy, second only to the fantasy many harbor about what happens when they do get top placement. The truth? Nothing much.

You don't suddenly get huge crashing waves of clients. You don't get rich overnight. Hell, you don't even get a certificate, much less a cash prize. You simply do a search for yourself one day and see your site at the top of the list, and walk around for the rest of the day with a goofy grin borne of a silly pride that normal people don't understand. In my case, I was at number one for over a month before I even realized it.

You will get more traffic, though not a lot more. You will get a higher quality of tire-kickers, but they're still only the people who set out looking for you first. Don't get so wrapped up in optimization that you forget that you're running a business. You'll learn soon enough that search engine placement is highly overrated, even in website promotion terms; it's only one weapon in your arsenal, and not the sharpest one.

It's the journey, not the destination. So you're at the very beginning, despairing to read that it could be a year before your site gets the engine placement you want. Or maybe the months have passed and you've created the perfect Web resource, and the engines now have you pegged at number one for your keywords. So what now?

Search engine optimization is a process, not a goal. No one is going to come along and certify your website "optimized"; there's only better and worse, readable and illegible, efficient and wasteful. In that process, you're never done working.

If you're in the lead now, remember that others out there are shooting for number one themselves. Meanwhile, there are bigger, wider markets to penetrate and conquer; there is plenty of room to expand your website into new areas, improving its resource quality. You had better be taking advantage of it if you want to stay at the top.

If you're just beginning, take heart. There are things you could be doing today to improve your website's ranking; while they won't put you at the top this week, they will advance the cause and set the stage for your bold jump into the big time.

And the sooner you begin, the sooner you can win.