Been a webmaster since 93 and wrote some of the first SEO articles. Meta data was more important but good SEOs were way beyond just that. Meta data was dead before 2000. IBL's never were anything until Google came along. WebCrawler used links but not to the extent Google does so they really weren't worth manipulating before G came along.

Back in those days it was mostly about optimizing hidden tags like img alt, keyword research the long tail has got a lot of attention lately but it was a big part of the job in the early days too. We also stressed the KW location in tags much more back then as well. To this day I still use the same formula for the opening and closing paragraphs and important tags like <Title>. The reason for that is the legacy algos still seem to be in place and the location of KW in those elements still seems very important details most SEOs don't understand. It is often discussed as being about KW density but... IMO, it's more about location in relatrion to the beginning end of the HTML element. KW density was also a crock... but don't get me started on that

My site back then was a major SEO reference
Search Engine Optimization Blog : SEO News archives and SEM industry posts
if you take the liink in the left margin marked archive and go to the SE part you'll see where I outlined the algo for most majors.
Search Engine Secrets Positions Tuorials:Improve search engine placements

Just an aside here. I do things now in pretty much the same way as I did in 2000. The algos changing is a myth. If you don't go outside of what is in your direct control then... algos changes will only affect you positively because they remove the "exploiters" to make way for truly relevant sites.

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Follow me on Twitter! On the Trail with SOSG How I became a Social Media Convert and Twitter and Agents of Influence and now regular poster at Cloudmixer where We're Mixing New Media Ideas.