How to Get Higher Search Engine Rankings
http://www.stc.org/intercom/PDFs/2004/200403_47-48.pdf

Leonard-Wilkinson, Theresa A.
Intercom
2004

Abstract:

In the early days of the Internet, you did not have to do much to drive traffic to your Web site. Simply listing your site with search engines (and all were free back then) could yield a lot of traffic. When I listed one of my sites with Yahoo!, my site hits increased by 10,000 in just one week. Back then, ranking was more a game of optimizing your TITLE and META tags than anything else. But in response to the mammoth growth of the Internet and abuses of META tags by unscrupulous Web designers, search engine spiders have became more sophisticated: The game now focuses on optimizing Web page content.