Every time you get your pages tuned the rules change. It is if you are playing a game of chess, checkmate your opponent, and then Kings can suddenly move more then one space and your going duh.
I think the major search engine companies have way too much power, but the bulk of the small search engines are not worth the bandwidth they take up.
I have moved in a totally different direction, looking for ways to combine dirt world and virtual world stuff. T-shirts, hats, business cards, flyers, banners, newspapers, coffee mugs, pens, in addition to link exchange, banner exchange, article submissions, email and if have time left over, I might alter a pages text for SEO.
I have considered the possibility of hiring an SEO person to tune my pages, but again, once it is all figured out, suddenly the rules will change.
You have to think outside the box, you are interested in traffic, so figure out ways to drive traffic to your site, and provide them with quality information when they get there. Customer loyalty is much more important then SEO, of course, this is just my opinion.