B. Mann Consulting

So, I ended up attending Alex's birthday party this past Saturday night (great Greek food at the Ouzeri in Kits, BTW). I know that he is a big SEO guy, so I thought I would give the "gift of a link". Alex runs a great consulting firm called emarketing 101, and Alex's title is a Vancouver BC Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Expert.

I remember first get interested in search results when I first started with Drupal. I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what worked, and why. I can safely say that I'm nowhere near knowing all of the intricate details and "tricks" of SEO, but I think I still know the basics -- clean HTML code, clean URLs, some logical cross linking of pages (tags are great for this), and so on. And, of course, the three C's -- compelling content constantly.

Will this be a trend? Have other people given links as birthday gifts?

Here - then - is the big secret of search optimisation. Search optimisation isn't really about optimising for a search engine at all. It's about making good quality, cleanly designed, semantically-constructed sites that people want to read, that people can link to and which people can get the gist of in a few seconds. If you make a website well for human beings, then as a side effect - more often than not - search engines will spider it well and rank it highly. And they'll do this because it's the best site, not because you're trying to fool them.
plasticbag.org | weblog | Against Search Engine Optimisers...

Amen. Except, of course, that most people stumble over the first part: "making good quality, cleanly designed, semantically-constructed sites". In theory, it's easy. In practice -- get someone who knows what they're doing to help you.