A while ago I performed a search for the term 'risto' on Google, but I was unable to find myself in the results. I clicked and clicked, but found only physics professors and fishing bait. Eventually I found myself on the ninth page of results. The competition was stiff.

I researched SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PageRank and implemented a few recommendations:

• There should be no more than 100 links on a page (I have around 60 on my home page)
• Meta tags and title tags that are used on multiple pages lose relevance, pages with these tags could be left out of indexing or not ranked well; setup each page to use its own meta and title tags
• Do not use meta redirects
• Put keywords in your url in decreasing order of importance, e.g. http://www.keyword1.com/keyword2/keyword3.php
• Every page should contain the character encoding label so that search engines can validate the version of code to expect and know how to deal with it; character encoding labels are typically at the very top of the source code -- refer to the HTML Validator
• Have all sites which link to you use the keyword or key phrase as the link text, with no extraneous text inside the a tags, i.e. if you're trying to optimize the word "hippodog" then sites should link to you using the HTML <a href="http://site.com">hippodog</a>

After a few weeks I went from the 95th position to the 3rd. Granted, 'risto' is not a hotly contested keyword -- and to be sure, this is a matter of approximately zero import -- but the result is interesting.