I don't understand why you're "wary" of search engine optimization.
The latest article I have read is that 40% of website traffic comes
from search engines.

Simply put search engine optimization means optimizing/maximizing the
chances of your site being listed when searchers are looking for
information related to your website. There are a lot of interesting
facts that I have found out - one being that people do a lot of online
searching for businesses and services that are in their local area as
opposed to them simply looking in their local yellow pages or local
paper - what that means to me is that even though the Internet is far
reaching to all over the world that one should not overlook their own
local market. I have a website that lists businesses in my own local
area and from my tracking service I have seen the kinds of businesses
and services that they are looking for but more importantly I have seen
the times that they have searched for this information - which is
almost any time of the day that you can think of including the early
morning and late at night.

There are many websites that get a huge amount of traffic without
paying for the search engine optimization. How they accomplish this is
to do the optimization themselves. The more time you spend on the
Internet (and especially more so when you are working on your own
pages) you will start to see a pattern of how traffic gets to your
site. On the other hand if your site is not receiving a lot of traffic
then you find out why. You find out where you rank in the search
engines and why your ranking is where it is. You find out from the
traffic that you do get why (and how) they got to your page(s). You
use methods (and by methods I'm talking about low or no cost methods
first) to increase your web traffic.

Another point that I have learned is that while increasing the number
of visitors to your pages increases the chances of your product or
service being sold you'll stand a better chance of selling more if you
target your site to your target market.

Rose
http://members.aol.com/Roseb441702/consult.htm