I have this website that I have been developing for about a year and a half. It's a very plain looking site with some standard Front Page CSS templates, with no logo, no graphics, no anything. No Web 2.0 in the slightest least.

This website is ranked number 2 in Google for what I believe is the most important to its content keyword. It leaves in the dust about 700,000 other pages that Google spits out when you search for the keyword in question. But that's not all: for the very same keyword, my site places first and second (!) on Yahoo! Search. How about MSN Search? The same as with Yahoo! Search, baby!

Now, you are probably thinking that I am some kind of SEO uberwizard. Well, if that's the case, then you cannot be more wrong!

The only optimization done on the site is accidental at best. Sure, you cannot avoid using the title tags if you want your pages to be recognizable in some intelligent manner by humans, but you will not find here any meta (keywords, description, etc.) tags or anything of this kind. Any H1, H2, etc. tags? Nope, none that you could see in the HTML source.

The site has fewer than 10 reciprocal links from other sites thematically related to it and some few dozen more relevant backlinks from other sites out there. To be quite honest, I have never paid particular attention to growing my links section so not many webmasters have exchanged them with me.

My site once reached the stratospheric Google Page Rank of 2, but a few months back got demoted to PR1, and now it's back to PR2. Yet it places way ahead of some PR3 to PR5 sites on the very first page of Google when you search for our relevant keyword. Much slicker, much more "professionally" looking sites with PRs you could actually brag about rank behind it!

The site may be in a few web directories, but I do not recall submitting it to any directory whose Page Rank is higher than 5. And even if I did submit it, I doubt it ever got listed. And to be honest again, I really did not care much about it either.

I have no blogs, no Squidoo lenses, no MySpace whatever-this-MySpace-thing-is-called, none of this newfangled stuff that I could have used to boost the position of my site in search engines.

What's the key to my success then? I will try to elaborate on it in another article here or on my site that you are most welcome to visit.

More articles about topics like that and a variety of others can be found in the Eclectic section of my site at http://www.eminimethods.com/Eclectic.html