When I started on 1/19 our site was 87 on Google for the selected search terms for our product. I modified Title, Description and added a content paragraph. In 7 days we went to #1 for the search terms. No links, no gimmicks, no linked extra pages. That's it. Content is all you really need. The issue is do you have anyone that can write good content? If you can't you use tricks, if you can, organic works. What Google showed in September with the change in algorithm is that tricks will be canceled out as Search Engines "learn" how to bypass them. But content will always work, because that's how humans work. Agood book sells, a bad book does not. What is the difference? Content. All the gimmicks an author tries to use in a book to mimic a best seller won't do a thing if the book has bad content. Same for a web site.

The issue is that SEO can be taught and learned in less than a day. This is a big threat to people who make their living selling products that "do" SEO or ranking for you by submiting to multiple SE. At the moment, if you at\re in DMOZ and Google, you will wind up almost everywhere in a few weeks. I have watched this happen by tracing a new site created for a friend. It's in all of the "pay for inclusion" sites like Inktomi and Overture, MSN etc and not a penny was paid.