What's this about?

Search Engine Optimisation: the art of creating content that feeds the search engine spiders that crawl through your site, looking for good content.

Search Engine Optimisation is circle between search engine, user, and web site.

The user has a keyword or two in their heads. The web site has those keywords in its content, because that's what it's about. The search engine brings the two together.

Of course, the trick is, to work out what the words your users will search on, so that you can include them prominently on your page, so that the search engine spiders will give you a descent ranking for those terms.

So, sure, I spelt optimisation with z in the headings of this page, because more people spell it that way. Of course, being British I couldn't allow myself to bow completely to the heavy hand of cultural imperialism, so I've spelt it the "proper" way too: optimisation.

Search Engine Optimization

Submit your site to Google, Altavista, All the Web, DMOZ, and Yahoo!
Most of the rest try and charge you. Which I'd imagine is a disincentive to submitting them, which means the search engines would be less accurate?
I-Search mailing list
Mailing list for search engine optimizers.
About.com Web Search
The usual excellent resources.
Search Engine Optimisation Tips
Simple no nonsense advice on optimising your pages to encourage search engines to find you.
I Help You Services Search Engine Forums
Wanna talk Search Engines? Find like-minded spirits here.
Google's advice on avoiding Search Engine Optimisation Pitfalls
Things to be wary of when choosing SEO consultants.
RankWrite.com
Practical advice on preparing your copy to be well spidered by the search engines.
Search Engine Watch
The daddy of search engine optimisations sites.
Search Engine Guide
The mummy of search engine optimisation sites.
Spider-Food.net
The other very good search engine optimisation site.

Search Engine Spies

How People Search
Differently from how Search Engine designers want them too.
Knowledge Technologies Conference, 2001
Variety of presentations on Knowledge, Ontology, and the Semantic Web.
Definitions of Classification Terms
Don't know your Taxonomy from your Ontology? Here are lots of resources to help.

Search Engine Tools

Key Word Count.com
Nifty utility to compare your page against another page (which you want to be ranked similar too), to help you improve your rankings. Downsides are that it only does one page at a time, and treats words as single entities, so that "information architecture" is two separate words, not one concept. Upsides are its free, you can exclude minor words, and if you enter only one URL, it will analyse just that page.
Wordtracker
Even better tool - compares your keywords with how often they are searched, what are their synonyms, and how much competition each term has, so that you can identify those terms that don't face too competition, and so increase your chance of your site appearing higher in the search listings
 
Google Monitor
Free tool for checking your position in Google against keywords you enter. Neat.
Link Popularity Checker
Three tools to compare your site's links with your competition, compare your site saturation with search engines against your competiton, and see where you rank in the major search engines.

Search Engine Spies

What People Search For
Search Engine Watch's links to search spies and keyword tools.
Disturbing Search Requests
Pointless but highly educational blog, featuring the distressing things people search for, and acerbic comments to put them into high relief [can contain "adult" content].
Ask Jeeves Peek Through the Keyhole
Dynamically look at what they're searching on at Ask Jeeves. Good clean fun.
Metaspy, watching MetaCrawler Searches
Dynamically look at what they're searching on at MetaCrawler, and choose between good clean fun, and "adult" fun.