At SEOChat, a 100th posting from expat reveals a very simple and down-to-earth approach to SEO that's brought him some recent success:

I inherited a stale store site without many links and a low PR. I came to the conclusion early on that trying to jump to Google's crazy dance was not worth the effort. Links acquisition is dog work -- and then you might get penalized (or even dropped) at the end of it. You only have to read the threads on Google Optimization for a few days to see the agony and frustration that's involved in dancing with Google. And what happens when G wakes up and decides to drop its obsession with links?

It's true that G has half the searches, just by itself, but the rest together also have half, and they are a lot less weird and idiosyncratic. If you make Y and MSN happy, you make almost all the rest of the also-ran SEs happy.

Writing good content, making every effort to help and guide the visitor around my site, and leading her to checkout with as few difficulties as possible was my first task. That helped conversion and was also a good start on SEO.

Then by choosing my top 3 KW phrases carefully, and doing a minor rewrite of the existing good content to emphasize them without getting (too) spammy, I was able to get all three KW phrases on the first SERP page for Y, MSN, askJ, and Alta Vista. (The other SEs tend to be more like Y than like G, but I haven't checked them out to see where I am).

I'm of the general belief that this type of strategy - designing with visitors in mind and optimizing for search friendliness will result in positive steps up in the future with Google. The search giant may be lumbering, but eventually, they reward sites that treat visitors well.