In this study we can see that pay per click advertising is surprisingly ineffective. It shows that there is no substitute for a well built site with relevant content. Donegalimage, my photography blog, usually sits in first place out of 2 million results, for it’s chosen keywords.
My 1st optimization strategy was to create good content. The second was to frequently use keywords in every blog post. Perhaps the most important part of my strategy was setting up good backlinks to posts. Google’s algorithms are complex, the people that work there are probably smarter than you, so you can’t really fool them. Instead focus on building a site that is genuinely interesting to your target audience, giving them more of their desired content in a better format than your competitors. Update the site more frequently than your competition and reinforce your keywords on each update. Meta tags don’t work any more either but I suppose they don’t hurt.